Sexual violence and scholarly silence: Questions from early 20th century Limón, Costa Rica: The Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas Around Sexual Abuse and Coercive Violence
Register: Here
How should we assess documentary traces of sexual violence and coercion in the past? Can we do no better than guess that risks of sexual victimization were roughly a constant in women’s and children’s lives? And if so, does that make it okay for us to leave those risks and those experiences out of our narratives? Or is sexual violence important for scholars to discuss precisely because it was continually present in women’s and girls’ experiences and concerns? As an evidentiary base for raising these questions, the paper draws on judicial records from the late 19th and early 20th century Limón, a province in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. Prof. Putnam will also address questions about her work on research and sources in transnational and immigration research, especially in a Caribbean basin context.
BIO: Lara Putnam is UCIS Research Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She researches social movements and political participation in local, national, and transnational dimensions. Her sole-authored books include The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (UNC Press, 2002) and Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (UNC Press, 2013). She is past co-senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, past president of CLAH, and past special editor for digital initiatives of the American Historical Review.
Her most recent publications include:
Caribbean Military Encounters: A Multidisciplinary Anthology from the Humanities. Shalini Puri and Lara Putnam, eds. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah Chambers, and Lara Putnam, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
“The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 2016): 377-402.
“Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads, circa 19101940.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, dossier on New Jazz Studies 25, no. 3 (2016): 1-21.
“Sentiment and the Restrictionist State: Evidence from the British Caribbean Experience, circa 1925.” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 5-31.
“Global Child-Saving, Transatlantic Maternalism, and the Pathologization of Caribbean Childhood, 1930s-1940s.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 11, no. 4 (2014): 491-514.
“The Panama Cannonball’s Transnational Ties: Migrants, Sport, and Belonging in the Interwar Greater Caribbean.” Journal of Sport History 31, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 401-424.
“Borderlands and Border-Crossers: Migrants and Boundaries in the Greater Caribbean, 18401940.” Small Axe 42 (2014): 7-21.
“Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean.” Journal of British Studies 53, no. 1 (2014): 162-191.
“Provincializing Harlem: The ‘Negro Metropolis’ as Northern Frontier of an Interconnected Greater Caribbean.” Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (September 2013): 469-484.
“The Ties Allowed to Bind: Kinship Legalities and Migration Restriction in the Interwar Americas,” International Labor and Working-Class History 83 (Spring 2013): 191-209.
