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.