Magdalena Candioti is Associate Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) at the Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr Emilio Ravignani” and Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Sciences, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina. Candioti’s doctoral research focused on the political history of justice in Nineteenth century Río de la Plata. She published Un maldito derecho: leyes, jueces y derecho en la Buenos Aires republicana, 1810–1830 (Buenos Aires, 2018) and several articles and book chapters on slavery and abolition in the Río de la Plata (Argentina). She was a visiting fellow in ILAS- Columbia University, NYC (2010-2011); Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (MPIeR), Frankfurt, Germany (2014). In 2014, she was awarded a scholarship by the Slicher van Bath DeJong Foundation, CEDLA (Holland) to conduct comparative research on slavery in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires.
Project description
At ALARI she will be working on a comparative project called “Freedom without equality: Towards a comparative legal history of the processes of abolition of slavery and subalternization of Africans and their descendants in the new republics of southern Hispanic America, 1808-1869”. Her research emphasizes the inextricable character of the policies of (gradual and even immediate) abolition and the policies of control of people of African descent in South America. It also traces intra and inter-American dialogues established among elites on alternative ways of abolishing slavery and regulating freed persons’ lives. Most of the classic research on Latin American abolitionism is center in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Brazil, and scholarship was mainly focused on the influence of the British abolitionist campaign and pressures. Without denying this incidence, this project seeks to reconstruct the inter-American dialogues, borrowings and innovations discussed and tested by different national elites in order to declare slavery abolished. Finally, she works on the identification of waves of abolitionism, and more specifically, on the circulation of different Atlantic traditions and languages of abolitionism.