Work-in-Progress talk: “Bound Biographies: Transoceanic Itineraries and the Afro-Iberian Diaspora in the Early Modern World”

Michelle McKinley, Law, and 2021–22 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

“Bound Biographies” charts the travel experiences of Afro-Iberians who left the peninsula in service of their owners, or as freed itinerant persons as they forged their lives in the Americas in the first two centuries of Spanish expansion and settlement in the New World. The project examines Afro-Iberian life on the Iberian Peninsula, traces Afro-Iberian travelers as they relocate in various port towns in the Americas, and follows their return to the peninsula after living for considerable periods of time in the New World. “Bound Biographies” is a geographically ambitious, multi-sited project that uses the sources to reconstruct the experience of black mobility that was not forced. It explores the lives of black travelers in an early diaspora that was not exclusively tied to—yet indelibly shaped by—the transatlantic slave trade.

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