PhD student Nicole Jozwik at the Archives of Colonial Dis/Possession conference and summer school
This past October, PhD student Nicole Jozwik attended the "Archives of Colonial Dis/Possession: Centering Non-European Perspective on Wealth (15th – 18th Centuries)" summer school and conference in Sevilla, Spain funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. The week-long event brought together junior scholars from Europe, Latin America, and the United States to generate alternative archival methods to recenter Indigenous, African, and Asian modes of history making and remembrance.
Nicole presented her paper entitled, “Potosí’s Silver Age, an Age of Wind: The Guayrachina as an Icon of Indigenous Technology and Global Extractivism,” which she intends to turn into a dissertation chapter. In her presentation, Nicole argued that foreign depictions of guayrachinas, or Indigenous wind furnaces, index Spanish extractivism of Indigenous technologies. Nicole contended that, while these images prove that the Spanish attempted to recreate such Indigenous innovations, their guayrachina images lack pictorial attention to the wind, ultimately exposing Western failures to reproduce Indigenous technologies. The audience’s specialties in colonial Latin America economic and social history provided useful feedback to strengthen her project.
Apart from the conference, the summer school also delivered archival and methodological workshops lead by literary scholars Allison Bigelow and Lisa Voigt and historian Renate Pieper. The workshops provided insight on how to respond to the challenges of the archive, the various approaches to historical translation, and publication strategies. The summer school also utilized the historic landmarks of Sevilla, framing its architecture and collections as archives of colonial wealth. Conference participants visited the Real Alcázar, Archivo de Indias, and Museo Marítimo Torre de Oro. Nicole and her colleagues were able to meet with the director of the AGI, who offered useful information on how the AGI was established and the variety of material housed in its collection. This proved useful, as Nicole intends to conduct archival research this summer at the AGI.
Nicole’s time at "Archives of Colonial Dis/Possession: Centering Non-European Perspective on Wealth (15th – 18th Centuries)" conference and summer school afforded her the opportunity to meet and connect with junior and senior scholars who were equally invested in subaltern histories and alternative methodologies. Nicole and her colleagues’ papers will be published in a collective volume in the coming year by De Gruyter publishing house.
