Issues in African Development Special Topic Seminar Series (CRP 4770/6770) - Fall 2020 Theme: Environment, Sustainability and Health Challenges in Africa: Managing Human-Nature Interactions. Issues in African Development Seminar Series examines critical concerns in contemporary Africa using a different theme each semester. The seminars provide a forum for participants to explore alternative perspectives and exchange ideas. They are also a focal activity for students and faculty interested in African development. In addition, prepares students for higher level courses on African economic, social and political development. The presentations are designed for students who are interested in development, Africa’s place in global studies, want to know about the peoples, cultures and societies that call Africa home, and explore development theories and alternate viewpoints on development.

Issues in African Development Special Topic Seminar Series (CRP 4770/6770) - Fall 2020 Theme: Environment, Sustainability and Health Challenges in Africa: Managing Human-Nature Interactions. Issues in African Development Seminar Series examines critical concerns in contemporary Africa using a different theme each semester. The seminars provide a forum for participants to explore alternative perspectives and exchange ideas. They are also a focal activity for students and faculty interested in African development. In addition, prepares students for higher level courses on African economic, social and political development. The presentations are designed for students who are interested in development, Africa’s place in global studies, want to know about the peoples, cultures and societies that call Africa home, and explore development theories and alternate viewpoints on development.

The food industry has a long history of driving and shaping low wage labor migration regimes, and around the world agriculture is often a site for large undocumented workforces, exploitative visa arrangements, and a disproportionate share of human trafficking as compared with other industries. Agricultural labor migration schemes have long permitted overcrowded housing and dangerous working conditions, allowing employer retaliation to trigger deportation of workers who speak up about dangerous conditions. Workers and allies in Asia have turned to labor organizing, trade policy, and the United Nations to address these concerns.

Presenter: Beth Lyon, Clinical Professor and Founder, Farmworker’s Legal Assistance Clinic at Cornell Law School

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oHFvyPPjQFWzCAfW6CwEpw

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"

After the fracture of the Republic of Colombia in 1831, a first civil war that took place in the Republic of New Granada—known as the War of the Supremes (1839-1842)—pitted slaveholding elites in New Granada’s Cauca region against the central government in Bogotá, whose republican platform centered egalitarian and inclusive antislavery goals. As a means of mobilization, Julio Arboleda, a powerful slaveowner in Cauca, founded the newspaper El Payanés. From the outset of the war, then, an influential proslavery voice was articulated publicly, and with the intent of fostering favorable opinion. The paper denounced what it called ‘violent acts’ by Afro-descendants across the country, and was expressly concerned with the supposed ‘sedition’ of Afro-New Granadans in and around the cities of Cali and Popayán. It produced a solid image of the dangers that the slaves, as a population, represented and argued in favor of their exclusion from the republic; literally their exportation outside of the territory.

This presentation contextualizes the rise of this proslavery publication in the broader process of republican formation in South America, analyzing the links of Arboleda’s proslavery activism to the emergence of a Pacific transnational class in defense of slavery. Putting El Payanés and its racist discourse about slaves’ incompatibility with the republican project at the center of the study, the presentation also reads Arboleda’s denunciatory accounts in El Payanés against the grain to trace slaves’ politics in Cauca as a crucial factor in the War of the Supremes and in close connection with the New Granadan antislavery republic’s foundations and goals.

Marcela Echeverri is the author of Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016

Please register to attend through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ln1QnVKOS4ykkb3vA_KccQ