The Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) hosts Department of History faculty member and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Ernesto Bassi for a lecture on his current research.

Abstract

During the late eighteenth century, Santa Marta (located in South America’s Caribbean coast) was a secondary province of a secondary viceroyalty in a Spanish empire undergoing renovations. Its doubly peripheral status did not mean isolation. In fact, Santa Marta, as evidenced by the writings and trajectory of Antonio Narváez y la Torre, was plugged in to the global circuits that connected the late early modern world. It was, at the same time and for certain purposes, also disconnected from these circuits.

In this talk I look at Narváez’s trajectory and his vision of a prosperous Santa Marta to approach an understanding of early modern globalization from the perspective of one particular place. The view from Santa Marta reveals the fact that Santa Marta’s elites had access to information flowing back and forth across the Atlantic. This information allowed Narváez and others to envision an export-oriented Santa Marta actively contributing raw materials (brazilwood, cacao, sugar, and cotton) to the growing European industrial centers. Using the journey of the frigate San Antonio, I connect Narváez’s visions (or dreams) with one of the early efforts to turn them into reality, an ambitious expedition that brought brazilwood from Santa Marta to Amsterdam, then sailed, loaded with rifles, to Boni (in western Africa), where it obtained enslaved Africans, with whom it sailed back to the Caribbean. Like the larger dreams of plantations Narváez envisioned, the journey of the San Antonio ended in a dramatic failure. Yet, just as the shattered dreams to turn Santa Marta into a vibrant plantation economy, the scheme of the San Antonio sheds light on the possibilities and limits that the flow of ideas, commodities, and people offered marginal places, like Santa Marta, to aspire to become key nodes of an increasingly connected, capitalist world.

Ernesto Bassi Arevalo is an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests coalesce around two significant questions: How do people develop geographic and cultural identifications? How do geographic regions come into being?

In particular, he is interested in the role circulation (of goods, people, news, and ideas) plays in the configuration of geographic spaces, collective identities, geopolitical projects, and political allegiances. He explores these themes from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective, especially by looking out to the world from the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

His first book, An Aqueous Territory, examines the configuration of a trans-imperial Greater Caribbean and its inhabitants’ geopolitical imagination through a study of the role of sailors in the creation of a regional space and the multiple ways in which less mobile (but by no means static) subjects, including autonomous indigenous groups, sugar planters, military adventurers, and nation makers, experienced the region sailors created.

His broader interests include the emergence of globalization during the early modern period, hemispheric connections and mobilities, the history of late colonial and early national Latin American countries (especially Colombia and its Caribbean region), indigenous-European encounters in the Caribbean Basin, the rise of capitalism, the development of plantation societies in the Caribbean, the flow of ideas, people, and commodities across the Atlantic Ocean, and the role of oceans in world history.

Professor Bassi is from Colombia and, without a student visa, would not have been able to pursue doctoral studies nor become a professor at Cornell. He teaches students how to understand the process of creation of patriotic narratives and to identify the purposes behind those narratives, as well as the multiple perspectives these narratives seek to erase. He thinks that international students are an important part of what makes U.S. universities and the U.S. great.

Meet internship supervisor Professor David Cordero-Heredia, Esq., Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, who will present the two Summer 2023 Law Research funded Internship opportunities—researching indigenous social movements or ancestral knowledge and the rights of nature.

Join us to learn more about the Summer 2023 Ecuador Reasearch and Engaged Internship opportunities in the Sciences, Social Sciences, Mapping/GIS, Law Research, and teaching English.

Prior to joining us, we recommend that you review the opportunities on our website:

Register and join us at: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIld-yopzguGNCUqqW6FxhqwOkuAM…

Join Bianca Graulau, an independent reporter from the island, for a discussion on the biggest issues facing the world's oldest colony. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.

LACS Public Issue Forum in collaboration with the Puerto Rican Student Association

Funded in part by a UISFL grant to Cornell's Latin American and Caribbean Student Program (LACS) from the U.S. Department of Education. Additional support provided by the American Studies Program, the Latina/o Studies Program, and the Society for the Humanities.

With a focus on gang violence in El Salvador, Dr. Córdova’s book examines how organized criminal groups’ operations in the territories they control, and the incursion of the police and military, threaten women’s safety. The main argument establishes that gangs’ territorial control increases women’s daily risk of gender-based violence in the streets of neighborhoods and in the privacy of homes, and that this risk is perpetuated by diminished reporting rates due to widespread distrust in the police, largely resulting from increased police abuse associated with the militarization of public security. The consequences of these dynamics for women’s resistance, particularly implications for international migration, are also explored.

Dr. Córdova’s book project, supported by a 2022 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award and a grant from the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, contributes to the growing literature in political science on criminal violence and militarization by identifying some of the mechanisms that explain women’s increased risk of gender-based violence in territories controlled by organized criminal groups in the midst of state repression.

Dr. Abby Córdova's project builds on and contributes to this research by examining the evidence on the effects of women’s police stations on citizens’ attitudes toward the police and gender-based violence as well as impacts on the incidence of violence against women and reporting rates in the context of Brazil.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr. Abby Córdova is an associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Córdova’s research examines the consequences of inequality and marginalization for democracy, integrating topics related to violence against women, organized crime, militarization, and international migration in the context of Central America, Mexico, and Brazil. She was awarded the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2022.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.