Lugares que fueron

• Main Author: Osvaldo Otero
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2010-01-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Africa; Americas; Black men; habitat; prison; slave trade
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/58594

There is a wide range of investigators that dealt with different areas of the slave trade—the economic, legal, smuggling, transportation, demographic, entrepreneurial and merchant areas—as well as its related illnesses and the abolition of slavery. Every port and place related to the slave business has been broadly studied, making an analysis of the multiple faces of this process. However, investigations about the transitory warehouses where captives were hold are scarce. Within this framework and its historiographical blanks, historians like us, who are interested in studying the materialization of places—as well as the material culture, and the symbolic and spatial interaction between men and their habitat—, try to enter the spaces of that complex system of meaningful and significant objects and places that structure spatiality. Thus, we manifest the need to take the slaves' warehouses as subject of analysis, studying the technological, functional and symbolic net that these people established between them and their captors, i.e., between slavery and power.