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Abstract
This dissertation asks how the racialization of Asian and Asian-diasporic bodies in the early modern Iberian world operated not through fixed categories, but through shifting codes of color, gender, religion and labor. I examine how these shifting codes were mobilized across religious texts, performance and visual representations to naturalize hierarchies of race and empire. At the same time, it foregrounds the violence of the colonial archive—its silences, distortions, and affective excesses—while tracing the relationalities between separately studied geopolitical frameworks to reveal the entangled histories of anti-Asian and anti-Black violence. Although scholars in early modern critical race studies and Iberian Studies have explored the question of race–especially the production of blackness as a racial category–in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, the racialization of Asian bodies in the transpacific remains largely undertheorized. My dissertation addresses this lacuna by foregrounding Asian and Asian- diasporic subjects as crucial to early modern race-making. It asks what happens when we move beyond the transatlantic frameworks and consider the entangled constructions of color, conversion and slave trade as a global phenomenon. This intervention is urgent not only because it examines never-studied manuscripts, centers previously peripheral figures and geopolitical frameworks, but also because it provides an intercolonial heuristic for understanding blackness as a malleable racial category in early modern times. In doing so, it foregrounds Afro-Asian intimacy as a force that both undergirds and disrupts the sacred historiography of the empire.