Black Monserrat: Race, Migration, and Real Estate in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 12:20pm to 1:30pm
About this Event
Central Campus
The global history of the interrelationship between race, migration, and real estate is still in its infancy, even as it promises a particularly rewarding angle on histories of how mobility and inequality have been intertwined. The Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, which during the second half of the nineteenth century received large numbers of European immigrants and underwent spectacular urban transformations, offers a window onto these problems. In recent decades, historians have increasingly viewed this migration through the lens of Argentine elites’ discourses of “whitening,” but they have rarely examined the concrete urban effects that European immigration had for the city’s Afro-descendants, who in the 1830s still constituted more than a quarter of the population. This talk attempts to do as much by looking at the formation of a Black neighborhood through real estate acquisition as well as the ensuing process of dispossession. While the empirical focus is micro-historical, the explanatory horizon is broader: The paper ultimately seeks to derive more general findings about the history of capitalism and inequality in the nineteenth-century Atlantic.
Michael Goebel is the Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin and co-director of the university’s Center for French Studies. Since his Ph.D. (University College London, 2006) he has also worked at the European University Institute, Harvard University, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. Following his 2015 book Anti-Imperial Metropolis, which won the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, he has increasingly grown interested in the emerging field of global urban history. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the SNSF-funded project Patchwork Cities, which explores the history of segregation in port cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On Monday, April 9, Michael Goebel will be giving another lecture, "Contagion, Inevitability, and Teleology: Imperial Disintegration and Nation-State Formation in Global History."
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Government, Department of History, Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Institute for European Studies.
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