Wednesday, September 2nd, 12-1PM
Coble Hall 306 & on Zoom: https://go.cgs.illinois.edu/OwenMacDonald
Desciption: In this talk, History PhD candidate, former Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies Fellow, and HRI graduate fellow Owen MacDonald explains his dissertation project, “Caribbean Amazônia: Labor on the Madeira-Mamoré Railway and the Making of Race, Gender, and Empire in Northwestern Brazil, 1870-1943,” within the context of African Diaspora and Afro-Latin American Studies. Connecting Indigenous and African-descendant history through Lélia Gonzalez’s theory of Amefricanidade and expanding on Abdias do Nascimento’s theory of Quilombismo, MacDonald investigates the contested formation of racial hierarchy, gender norms, Brazilian state-making, and United Statesian empire building in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition of Gonzalez, Nascimento, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Cledenice Blackman, MacDonald invites invested scholars and communities to think together through the US-funded railroad project on Indigenous Amazonian land built by racialized workers from Brazil and the Caribbean.
Bio: Owen MacDonald is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he is finishing his dissertation "Caribbean Amazônia: The Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, Labor, and the Making of Race, Gender, and Empire in Northwestern Brazil, 1870-1942." He holds a master's degree in African and African American Studies from the University of Kansas. He is a current graduate fellow at the Humanities Research Institute and has been a Lemann Center Graduate Fellow, Illinois Distinguished Fellow, and Fulbright Hays Fellow.