In US schooling and popular culture, discussions of slavery generally consider only the pre-1865 enslavement of African-descended peoples in the US South.  By contrast, our ETHN 101 unit on “Slavery and Afrolatinidad” widens the lens, allowing us to understand the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples in the “New World” as a transnational economic and cultural system – a system that in many ways continued to operate long after the formal abolition of slavery, with effects that still impact people’s lives today. 

Write a short paper (approximately 750 words) in which you discuss this broader transnational history of “New World” racialization and slavery (including what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery” – that is, ideologies and structures of race and violence that persist despite the abolition of chattel slavery itself).  In other words, how does a transnational perspective help us understand slavery and racialization in ways that go beyond US-centric narratives?

For full credit, your paper must meaningfully cite from at least three of the readings from Part IV of ETHN 101.  The paper must be written in coherent academic language, following all the writing conventions you have learned in your English classes.  Make sure your analysis centers specific facts and ideas from ETHN 101; avoid unsupported generalizations (e.g., “Throughout human history…”), clichés (“Humanity should come together…”), and other space-wasting fluff.