This workshop aims to address questions surrounding the intersection of mobility, migration, and belonging in the early modern global Atlantic. In the past, the themes of mobility, migration, and belonging have garnered extensive and sustained scholarly inquiry predominantly within the conceptual paradigm of “diaspora” and “networks.” Specifically, the Sephardic diaspora and economic networks have dominated debates on these subjects. This workshop’s goal is to move beyond interpretations that treat the Sephardic diaspora and other diasporas as discrete or self-contained phenomena and to examine the more complex social and political aspects of long-distance economic networks. We do not wish to dismiss the importance of trade networks or the visibility and breadth of the Sephardic diaspora. Rather, we seek to highlight their integration with broader histories of voluntary and forced migration, social, religious, economic, and political mobility, and individual and collective belonging or displacement. By focusing on the Global Atlantic we further seek to highlight the entanglement of diaspora and networks with empire and imperialism in the early modern period. The early modern Atlantic featured a magnitude of forced and voluntary migration, social mobility, and constantly evolving paradigms of belonging that were unmatched in other global contexts of the time. However, rather than viewing the Atlantic as a bounded or self-contained space, we seek to position it as a dynamic arena intricately embedded within broader global systems of the early modern period.
Sponsored jointly by the Jewish Studies Program at Yale University, the Cátedra de Estudos Sefarditas Alberto Benveniste at the Universidade de Lisboa, and the Center for Humanities (CHAM) at Nova FCSH.
