Historia y Sociedad 44 (January-June of 2023): The Legal Ambiguities of Slavery and Freedom and Historia y Sociedad 45 (July-December 2023): places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction

Orián Jiménez-Meneses Announcement
Location
Colombia
Subject Fields
Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies, Slavery, Law and Legal History, Historic Preservation, Public History

Historia y Sociedad 44 (January-June of 2023): The Legal Ambiguities of Slavery and Freedom and Historia y Sociedad

The journal Historia y Sociedad at Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín invites national and international scholars to participate in issue number 44 (January-June of 2023) by submitting unpublished manuscripts in Spanish, English or Portuguese on the themes for the special issue “The Legal Ambiguities of Slavery and Freedom”

Guest Editors

Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon, USA

Edgardo Pérez Morales, University of Southern California, USA

Deadline for Submissions: March 30th, 2022

Description and goals

In the study of slavery and freedom, historians and sociologists have long relied on positive law to find their bearings. From Justinian’s Code to the Code Noir to the Law of Servants and Slaves, scholars have assessed legal texts to better understand who or what, exactly, were the slaves before the law. When it comes to the legal dimensions of slavery in the Americas, our central organizing categories typically retain a sense of certainty inherited from the clear-cut meaning with which lawgivers sought to regulate ambiguous and unstable social processes and definitions. But as they changed across the generations and in everyday life power contests, words like captive, slave, “Negro,” Christian, master, husband, wife, sovereignty, and even race and justice were objects of conflict and ambiguity, terms to be defined and re-signified, appropriated or ignored according to need and opportunity. A single, commonly accepted legal doctrine on the origins and justifications of slavery never developed. For those enslaved litigants who reached the tribunals in their quests for dignity or freedom, the room for legal invention and argumentation could be ample indeed. Whether in slavery, in freedom, or in the interstitial judicial and social spaces, legal parameters and language were not always stable or predictable, and the written law never reigned supreme.

This special issue seeks to explore those spaces of legal ambiguity in which this inherent instability of slavery and freedom unfolded. We seek contributions from historians working on the legal, cultural, and political histories of slavery and freedom anywhere in the Americas, or in comparative or connected perspectives. Our goal is to publish a sample of critical work that shows how our legal understanding of slavery and freedom is mutating as scholars drop binary oppositions and the primacy of the written law, turning instead to the semantic malleability of legal culture and the messy counterpoint between legal codes, local power dynamics, and litigation by successful and unsuccessful enslaved litigants and their allies.

The special issue seeks to build bridges across scholarly communities in the Americas. It will materially contribute to this enterprise by publishing the articles accepted for publication in both English and Spanish (besides the original language of submission—Spanish, English, or Portuguese). Historia y Sociedad has published peer-reviewed articles on Colombian, Latin American, and World history for over twenty-five years, and has recently contributed to trans-national academic dialogues with seven special issues.

The guest editors hope to gather contributions exploring the ways in which enslaved people encountered masters and magistrates in different legal instances and made claims and counter-claims not only following or interpreting the law but, even more consequentially, developing vernacular, fresh legal meaning from within the blurry, ambiguous spaces of the law of slavery and freedom.

Potential contributions might include work on how enslaved people and their allies developed legal logics over litigation; how legal traditions and texts shaped masters’, magistrates’ and clerics’ treatment of their human property in both positive and negative ways; how legal codes helped or hindered enslaved peoples’ claims to concessions by masters and officials; how enslaved litigants and magistrates navigated overlapping jurisdictions and contradictory doctrines and legal principles; in what ways women and children sought to reshape or shift their status as property according to gender expectations and religious norms ignored by abusive masters; how legal activism both reinforced hierarchies and patriarchy and destabilized the corporate order; what doctrines and practices of political belonging enslaved people used as they sought to become free vassals or citizens; and what ambiguities (legal, racial, cultural) enslaved litigants found useful to craft not only particular uses and interpretations of the law, but specific understandings of justice and new definitions of right and wrong.

Thematic Lines

Our general themes include, but are not limited to:

  • The making and unmaking of the law of slavery.
  • Race, religion, and the law in the making of slavery and freedom.
  • Legal activism and legal culture among the enslaved.
  • Marriage and family life in slavery.
  • Pathways to autonomy, manumission, and freedom.
  • Emancipation, abolition, and citizenship.
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Historia y Sociedad 45 (July-December 2023): places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction

The journal Historia y Sociedad at Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín invites national and international scholars to participate in issue number 45 (July-December 2023) "Places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction" by submitting unpublished manuscripts in Spanish, English or Portuguese on the themes for the special issue “Places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction”

Guest Editors

Carlos Guillermo Páramo Bonilla, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Vladímir Montaña Mestizo, Universidad de Tours, (France)

Marcela Quiroga Zuluaga, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (Colombia)

Deadline for Submissions: April 30th, 2022

 

Objectives of the dossier

In various parts of the world, including Colombia, collective actions have been taking place that have resulted in the transgression of the national symbolism, to put into question the repertoire of representations agreed by the imaginary or imagined community that is the nation. Inverted flags, bleeding flags, demolished monuments, episodically erected monuments, deconstructed national anthems, the reappearance of the national coat of arms on the flag and the emergence of new spaces for protest in urban areas are some of these expressions that reveal a certain nonconformity in the face of these symbols whose purported purpose is to identify us as a unit. Indeed, for certain social sectors, the symbolic repertoire of the nation is losing its symbolic efficacy and it seems that we are facing a new tension between symbol, memory and national identity. This symbolic confrontation is not exclusively recent, and this idea motivates this dossier. His goal is to think of this tension as a historical constant. On the one hand, we are interested in reflecting on the configuration of those places of national memory that were conceived by political elites throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and with which those particular imaginary communities that are the American nations. On the other, we propose to analyze the imposition and transformation of meanings, uses and functions of places of memory (symbols, monuments, archives, objects, people and emblematic places) of republican symbolism in different fields of the social, political and religious world. and cultural. Reflection that also calls us to observe the role played by other less recognized populations (Afro-descendants, indigenous people, women, peasants, workers) in this symbolic configuration. Based on this interest, the dossier also opens up to the possibility of historically analyzing objects and places of memory alternative to the unique national story. In the framework of this reflection, we expect contributions in Spanish, English or Portuguese that allow us to disseminate comparative research or case studies in the American and global context that respond, for example, to the following themes: local places of memory that have entered dispute with the hegemonic national memory; places of memory in the nation's configuration processes; the transformation of the meaning and function of urban and rural monumentality; religious spaces and objects as places of collective memory; the decline and emergence of places and objects of memory; the symbolic efficacy of monuments; education and the imposition of places of memory, among others. From the analysis of these aspects, in different spatial or temporal contexts, we hope to provide theoretical and methodological elements that allow us to understand in its complexity and diversity the symbolic tension between history, memory and identity.

Thematic lines

General topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Relationship between memory, spaces and objects.

Uses and functions of places of memory (symbols, monuments, archives, objects, people and emblematic places) in the social world, and their dynamics of change in urban and rural contexts.

Material and immaterial manifestations of memory in identity constructions.

Representations, stories and discourses of the historicizing history of the nation and its transformations to the present.

Conservation, reproduction and deconstruction of places of memory and heritage; relationships, tensions and ruptures.

Places of memory and disputes for symbolic hegemony.

Contact Information

Historia y Sociedad 44 (January-June of 2023): The Legal Ambiguities of Slavery and Freedom and Historia y Sociedad

The journal Historia y Sociedad at Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín invites national and international scholars to participate in issue number 44 (January-June of 2023) by submitting unpublished manuscripts in Spanish, English or Portuguese on the themes for the special issue “The Legal Ambiguities of Slavery and Freedom”

Guest Editors

Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon, USA

Edgardo Pérez Morales, University of Southern California, USA

 

Deadline for Submissions: March 30th, 2022

More information Call 44:  https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/hisysoc/announcement/view/1201

Historia y Sociedad 45 (July-December 2023): places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction

The journal Historia y Sociedad at Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín invites national and international scholars to participate in issue number 45 (July-December 2023) "Places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction" by submitting unpublished manuscripts in Spanish, English or Portuguese on the themes for the special issue “Places of memory in tension: symbols, memory and national construction”

Guest Editors

Carlos Guillermo Páramo Bonilla, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Vladímir Montaña Mestizo, Universidad de Tours, (France)

Marcela Quiroga Zuluaga, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (Colombia)

Deadline for Submissions: April 30th, 2022

More Information call 45: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/hisysoc/announcement/view/1227

 

Contact Email
revhisys_med@unal.edu.co