Brodwyn Fischer, “Slavery’s City and the Genesis of Urban Informality”, 14.03.2024, 5:00pm-7:00pm CET

Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris & Zoom*

Compulsory Registration

“Slavery’s City and the Genesis of Urban Informality“

How is the history of slavery linked to urban inequality in the Americas’ largest and most enduring slave society? This talk approaches that question through the visual and relational infrastructures of slavery in nineteenth century Brazil. By suggesting links between slavery’s city and the genesis of urban informality as a primary mode of city-building and governance after abolition, I suggest some of the ways that contemporary socio-racial inequalities can be understood as afterlives of Brazil’s most foundational injustice.

Speaker

Brodwyn Fischer, Professor of History, University of Chicago

Brodwyn Fischer (Ph.D. Harvard 1999) is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on the intersecting histories of cities, law, race, inequality, slavery and social movements in Brazil and Latin America. Her publications include articles and translations in English and Portuguese as well as A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford 2008); Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, Duke 2014); The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition and the Making of Modern Brazil (With Keila Grinberg, Cambridge U. Press 2022); and Informal Cities: History, Power and Precarity in Latin Europe, Latin America, and Colonial North Africa (with Charlotte Vorms, forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2025).  She has won several national book and article awards, and her research has been funded by the ACLS, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the SSRC. In 2022-3, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, writing a book called Intimate Inequalities that seeks to understand urban informality as an afterlife of slavery through the history of Recife, Brazil.

*The zoom link will be sent to you on the day of the seminar

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr