History, University of California, Irvine

Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) Postdoctoral Fellow

During her year of residency, Rachel O’Toole will conduct research related to The Law in Slavery and Freedom, an ongoing project co-directed by Professor Rebecca Scott and Professor Martha Jones. This is a teaching and research initiative that encourages historically-oriented work on law, slavery, and post-emancipation societies in the Atlantic World.  Through face-to-face and web-based collaborations, participants from the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Germany, Canada and France have developed conferences and seminars, while sharing ideas and archival materials.  This new postdoctoral initiative is undertaken in conjunction with the HASTAC program (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), and is aimed at expanding the creative use of new technologies to enrich these international exchanges among scholars

O’Toole describes her work: “How did Spanish colonialism shape people’s identities in colonial Peru? I find that Spanish authorities and local landholders labeled a diverse African population as ‘black’ to signify an enslaved status. At the same time, colonial officials created ‘Indians’ from multiple indigenous communities in order to extract tribute and labor. Indigenous people could claim their rights as Crown subjects and so they came to identify as “Indian”. Yet, enslaved Africans remained legally ambiguous. Instead, sugar workers and market venders from Senegambia or Central Africa created Diaspora communities beyond the names the Spanish called them. By the early 18th century, if Spanish colonization occurred, it happened at an intimate level. Indigenous and African-descent people named themselves with colonial labels that could be claimed or discarded, depending on necessity, circumstance, and the law.

In residence, 2006-2007