This week’s chapter by Andres Resendez illustrates how European slave traders during the sixteenth century used legal ambiguities and legal loopholes to enable the establishment of a large-scale traffic in enslaved Native people within Spain’s “New World” territories, despite the fact that the enslavement of these populations was technically prohibited under Spanish law during this era. Several of our other readings from this semester have similarly discussed the complex relationships between legal regimes and racialized violence. Sara Johnson, Brendan Lindsay, and Paja Faudree, for example, all discuss various complex – and sometimes contradictory – relationships between laws and the legitimation of violence against Black and/or Indigenous peoples. For this discussion thread, share some thoughts about this subject: how does putting the Resendez chapter into conversation with one or more of our previous texts produce new insights about the law, racialization, and violence? (Just a paragraph is fine, but you can definitely write a longer post if you like!)
0 comments