A LACS 60th Anniversary Special Seminar

In this event, historians Tessa Murphy (Syracuse) and Heather Roller (Golgate) will join LACS director Ernesto Bassi in a conversation about Murphy’s and Roller’s recently published, award-winning books The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (2021) and Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (2021).

Murphy and Roller will uncover the multiple ways indigenous people in the Lesser Antilles and Brazil encountered Europeans, expanding the universe of interactions beyond futile efforts of resisting European encroachment. Their books show how indigenous people in the eastern Caribbean and the Brazilian interior prevented Europeans from establishing sovereignty in what the Kalinagos, the Mura, and other indigenous groups considered their territories. Successfully deploying technology and diplomacy, strategically engaging in trade and warfare, and even developing alliances with other newcomers, were all part of the toolkit indigenous groups used to maintain their treasured autonomy.

The Creole Archipelago won the 2022 James A. Rawley Prize, granted by the American Historical Association, to recognize outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century, as well as the 2022 FEEGI book prize, granted by the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, for its groundbreaking examination of “islands beyond empires” and of local/creole and indigenous instrumentality in forging a Creole Archipelago.

Contact Strategies won the 2022 Friedrich Katz Prize, granted by the American Historical Association, to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean, as well as the 2022 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize for the Best Book in Social Sciences, granted by the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). An Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests lie in the history of the colonial Americas, broadly defined to include the Caribbean, Central, and South America, and what are now Canada and the United States.

Heather Roller, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). A Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Colgate University, where she teaches courses on global environmental history, Brazil and Amazonia, and the histories of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In addition to Contact Strategies, she is the author of Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil.