03/31/2026
Join THR on Friday, April 10th, in Barnum 104 for our annual Presidential Lecture! This year, professor Alejandro de la Fuente of Harvard University will be giving a lecture entitled "Slavery, Freedom, Race, and the Law in the Americas." Please see below for more information on the lecture and our wonderful speaker! 🐘 📖
Based on the book Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (2020, co-authored with Ariela J. Gross, UCLA), this lecture explores the formation and evolution of legal regimes of slavery and race in the Americas, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, using Cuba, Virginia and the hybrid legal system of Louisiana as examples. Although in all three places slaveholding elites acted to cement the association between African origin and slavery, linking blackness to social degradation, by the mid-nineteenth century the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different. We argue that it was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law.
Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. His works on comparative slavery, racial inequality, art, legal history, and Afrodescendant mobilization have been published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. He is the founding director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, which coordinates the University Consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies, a Ford Foundation-funded collaborative network that includes universities and research groups in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. His most recent book is My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art (with Cary A. García Yero) published in English and Spanish in 2025.
