Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain and the Global Hispanophone World
Description
Our seminar addresses the question of how culture produced in Spain, from the 19th century to the present, reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained on colonialism and slavery. We seek proposals from faculty and graduate students that address the impact of slavery in the cities, cultures, and societies of Spain and its former colonies, particularly Cuba, the Philippines, and Equatorial Guinea.
The legacies of slavery have become an important subject of public discourse and humanistic inquiry in recent years. In Spain, this problem took on urgency following the passage of the Laws of Historical and Democratic Memory (2007, 2022), which sought to recognize the rights of those who suffered persecution during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Franco. Despite the progress that Spain’s historical memory movement has made in confronting the legacies of the dictatorship, there has been a dearth of government-supported programs aimed to reckon with the legacies of colonialism. Even the more recent of these laws has remained silent on the colonial question, despite the links between Spanish colonialism and the dictatorship.
We base our seminar on our book: Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain. Our goal is to propose new approaches, beyond those presented in the book, to understanding the legacies of slavery in modern Spain and the Global Hispanophone world. In the book, we consider the manifestations of the legacies of slavery in diverse cultural forms and institutions: literature, the visual arts, archives, monuments, memorials, museums, slavery routes, public history, and grass-roots initiatives. We seek abstracts addressing one of the three following aspects, including new methodologies (the seminar will meet 3 times):
- the legacies of slavery in the archive
- the legacies of slavery in cultural memory sites
- the legacies of slavery in literature, music, and visual culture
The objective is to raise crucial humanistic questions at a moment in Spanish and global history when conversations about anti-racism, social justice, and reparations to formerly enslaved communities are finally taking place. Scholars in the humanities are beginning to see the task of decolonizing cultural productions and institutions as an ethical imperative. Our goal as humanists is to challenge dominant cultural narratives on race and colonialism, and to bring the previously hidden narratives of Afro-descendant communities to the forefront of our academic disciplines. Our hope is that this will lead to a greater awareness of and eventual reckoning with the crime of slavery and its legacies that remain largely unacknowledged by Spanish society. To explain why societies must confront their imperial legacy and challenge systems of knowledge that continue to be rooted in their colonial past is a critical task for the humanities scholar and a necessary step toward fighting systemic racism.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Anna More is professor in the Department of Literary Theory and Literatures at the University of Brasília. She is author of Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (2013) and co-editor or Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (2019). She is currently working on a book on the early Iberian slave trade and has published related articles in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, African Economic History and Social Text.
Speaker Bio
Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro is Assistant Professor at Brown University's Department of Hispanic Studies.
Speaker Bio
I am Associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. My research is archived based. I have published Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (2018); Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text, and Performance in Modern Spain (2021, co-edited with Irene Gómez-Castellanos); The Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (2025, co-edited with Akiko Tsuchiya).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Thenesoya (Ph.D. Harvard) is a scholar in Global Hispanophone and Modern and Contemporary (Pen)Insular Studies. Her research focuses on postcolonial literature and cultural production and rhetorics of imperial insularity. Co-author CISLANDERUS, a cultural on 18th-C Canarian immigration to Louisiana. FAS Postdoc, Harvard. Worked at Trinity College, U.C. Davis, Duke, Vassar College. MA/BA Comp. Lit. (medal H.R.H. Infanta Cristina), Universidad Complutense, BA Hispanic Philology, ULPGC.
Speaker Bio
I am Latina born in New York who grew up in South Florida. I completed MA grad work (FPI) at the Universities of Salamanca/Valladolid. In 2022 as a Stanford–CUNY grad teach fellow, I returned to NYC to serve urban, public higher education. I defended my dissertation, Chica, How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Women of Color Write América, in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University in 2024, and now serve as assistant adjunct professor at City College-History and Queens College-English.
Speaker Bio
Diego Baena is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, CT). He received his PhD. from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University in 2020. His current book project --La literatura y sus pueblos: demopoéticas de la España Liberal (1833-1868) -- explores the intersection between popular literacy, various forms of popular media, censorship, and dissident political cultures in nineteenth-century Spain.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jeanne Rosine Abomo Edou is a Cameroonian pedagogue trained at the Ecole Normale in Yaoundé and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature applied to Hispanic Studies. She also holds two master's degrees (in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language and in Hispanic Literature). She is currently ABD in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Washington (United States) and a Fellow Graduate Student at CRE2.
She co-authored the anthology Literatura y mujer and has a dozen publications.
Speaker Bio
Silvia Bermúdez is a Professor of Literature. Feminist and Cultural Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current scholarship focuses on antiracist feminisms.
Speaker Bio
Akiko Tsuchiya is Professor Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the co-editor of Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (SUNY P, 2025). Her other books include, Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Fin-de-siècle Spain (U of Toronto P, 2011) and two co-edited volumes, Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (Vanderbilt UP, 2016) and Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World (SUNY Press, 2019).