The Affect & the Emotions Workshop and the Medicine & Its Objects Workshop present:
Isabela Fraga
PhD Candidate, Romance Languages and Literatures
Discussant: Zoë Berman
PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development
“Nostalgic Subjects of Colonial Medicine:
Trajectories of Feeling in Iberian Slavery”
Abstract: This paper investigates the circulation of feeling and sentiment in medical and juridical texts that address slavery and enslaved Africans in Cuba and Brazil. Although the influence of British sentimentalism on abolitionist texts throughout the Americas does not lack in scholarship, the trajectories of this rhetoric in other fields—such as medicine and law—remain largely understudied. In this piece, I focus on several textual instances addressing the “diseases of the mind” that afflicted enslaved people in Brazil and Cuba—medical manuals, slave insurance documents, political treaties, etc. From late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, these diseases appear under different names such as “nostalgía,” “banzo,” or “melancolia.” As illnesses that speak to the enslaved soul or mind instead of the body, they are privileged rhetorical spaces where men of letters involved in the governance and treatment of slaves build a conception of subjectivity based on feeling and sentiment instead of reason. In so arguing, I hope to show how sentiment and feeling inform the institution of slavery and the governance of slaves in Iberian territories (or former territories), where the enslaved soul was already an object of religious concern.
Monday, November 25th
4:30 to 6:00 p.m.
Cobb 409
The paper can be accessed here using the password nostalgia.
***Snacks and refreshments will be served***
The workshop is open to the public, and we are committed to making our sessions accessible to all persons.
Questions, requests, or concerns may be directed to
Michal Zecharia (michalz@uchicago.edu) or Katie Gibson (gkate@uchicago.edu).
