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Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Description: By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.In Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Chelsea Berry illuminates the co...