Sembe Presents at African American Intellectual History Society Conference
The African American Intellectual History Society’s (AAIHS) Tenth Anniversary Conference was held March 14-15, in Providence, Rhode Island, in partnership with Brown University. Centered around the theme “Slavery and Its Afterlives”, the conference examined the multifaceted legacies of slavery across geographies locations and time periods, such as memory and community, cultural expressions, global diasporic perspectives, body politics, and more. Spanish PhD student Karina Sembe presented at the conference – she tells us about her paper below.
“I presented my paper “Social Exchange and Migratory Routes in the Making of Black Upward Mobility: The Case of Emiliano Mundrucú’s Pragmatic Abolitionism.” A version of this paper will be published in The Journal of African American History, vol. 111, no. 1, Winter 2025-26. Afro-Latin American stories like the one explored in my paper demonstrate that overlapping historical contexts and social conditions do not necessarily produce a shared racial awareness or ideology across and within the Black diasporas. I seek to articulate contested Black identities beyond the U.S. context to forge productive cross-cultural encounters and, as a result, diverse and empowered diasporic futures.”