HAPSAT Graduate Workshops - Second Winter Session - 2026

HAPSAT GRADUATE WORKSHOPS

In person event | February 11 | 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

This session will feature two presenters 

Against planter ingenuity: a case study of two antebellum plantations and their Senegambian foremen

Tola Ajao

From the end of the 18th century to the antebellum period, agricultural knowledge moved between enslaved and planter communities in the coastal south of Georgia and South Carolina creating dizzying fortunes for the region’s rice and cotton barons. Scholars have shown the Senegambian antecedents of South Carolina’s agricultural methods but have not established how this knowledge moved. Considered model farms in their day, a case study of two closely connected barrier island plantations roughly 10 km off the Georgia coast indicates the figure of the Black Foreman as an important conduit for such knowledge. 

Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali remembered their capture into slavery from polities in the Western Sahel (Senegambia) in the late 1700s. As Foremen enslaved on large, mechanized plantations on Sapelo and St Simon's Islands in Georgia, each man directed the work of hundreds of slaves, a managerial role more often performed by Blacks in the lower south than historians have acknowledged. Bilali and Salih lead self-sustaining slave communities  whose survival depended on the marine, aquatic and terrestrial ecologies in which they worked and lived. Known as engines of innovation, Sapelo and St Simon’s  attracted visitors such as Charles Lylle, Richard Olmstead, and Fanny Kemble. By reading the colonial archive against histories of enslavement, STS, archaeology and oral history, this paper tells a story of agency in spaces of captivity and asks: can the planter be made to testify against his own professed ingenuity and reveal the African sources of his knowledge?

“Blind sorcerer” and “maimed surgeon”: Recovering Perceptions of Disability in Early Modern West Central Africa

Myriam Iuorio

This paper investigates 17th and 18th century Italian missionary writings to illuminate how experiences and perceptions of bodily impairments provided unique opportunities for social empowerment in early modern West Central Africa. 

A careful analysis of Capuchin writings from the Kingdom of Kongo reveals significant insights into West Central African perceptions of disabled bodies as markers of an individual’s connection with the world of the Ancestors and spiritual forces. The missionaries often remarked on the role of people with disabilities as healer-diviners, noting how specific experiences of impairments were believed to grant individuals with special healing and divining abilities, which allowed access to prestigious social roles.

While the field of disability studies has expanded to examine non-European societies, the experiences and perceptions of impairments in pre-colonial Africa have remained overlooked in the scholarship. By reading against the archival grain, this paper argues for the need to investigate past experiences and meanings of disability from outside Western categories of thought. Exploring the connection between bodily differences, spirituality and the healing world shaping the experiences of people with disabilities in early modern West Central Africa, it highlights the existence of socio-cultural frameworks that allowed for positive and empowering interpretations of impairments in the premodern world, which warrant further investigation. 

Workshop Organizer: Rebecca Muscant, MA Candidate