Over the past two decades, communities of African descent across Latin America have made notable strides in the fight for political representation and socio-cultural recognition. As a result of increased public attention, scholarship on Afro-Latin American peoples has expanded the concept of the African diaspora beyond the Anglophone and Francophone theories that were popularized during the latter half of the twentieth century. It is now widely accepted in popular culture that people of African descent have a substantial presence in Latin America populations. In Brazil, for instance, tourists can visit quilombos (runaway slave communities) or take expeditions to learn about the black histories of popular cities, such as Rio de Janeiro or Salvador. Popular travel resources, including Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor, encourage would-be tourists to plan vacations where they will learn about Afro-Colombian, Afro-Mexican and Afro-Peruvian cultures, among others.

Despite, however, this increased interest in Afro-Latin American communities, scholarship on the Atlantic diaspora continues to follow patterns established more than half a century ago in the English-speaking global north. Contemporary research is often still oriented toward Anglophone theories and experiences of diaspora, even though less than twelve percent of all enslaved Africans were taken to English-speaking regions.

For instance, it is not uncommon for literary scholars to examine the dialogue between the work of Latin American authors and that of early African-American intellectuals, such as W.E.B. DuBois (e.g. Glasgo, 1992; Hellwig, 1992; Marx, 1998; Sawyer, 2009). Another academic trend is to import popular Anglophone theories of African diaspora and culture (e.g. Gilroy or Stuart Hall) in order to read Afro-Latin expressions of identity. The reverse approach, however, is rare. That is, definitions of diaspora originating in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas are seldom mobilized to interpret African-American or Afro-British identity. Rarer still are studies that put Afro-Latin American authors and activists in dialogue—that trace the historic exchanges within Hispanophone and Lusophone America (exceptions include work by scholars such as Antonio Tillis and Tianna Paschel).

Our session will speak to that gap in research by examining links between African descendants in Brazil and Colombia. Brazil has the largest black population outside of Africa, and Colombia has the largest Spanish-speaking black population in the world. Since the middle of the twentieth century, writers from both countries have elaborated complex afro-latinidades, or conceptualizations of what it means to be both afrodescend(i)ente and Brazilian or Colombian.

Panelists will speak for 10-12 minutes, and their presentations have been selected in order to explore links between Colombia and Brazil that carried over from the nineteenth century into the twentieth and twenty-first. In the first presentation, “Afro-Brazilian Abolitionism: Black Heroes and Journalists in Pre-Abolition Brazil,” María Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles analyzes how Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Colombian intellectuals of the abolition era appropriated liberal concepts of liberty and equality to contest the discourse of criminalization promoted by dominant groups. Aguilar-Dornelles will highlight how various nineteenth-century authors, such as Francisco de Paula Brito and Luiz Gama, used rhetorical strategies to depict themselves as heroes within the black press. Her presentation will argue that depicting slaves and free people of color as heroic figures was unprecedented in the Americas and that this phenomenon shows the influence of Afro-descendent intellectuals in the expansion of democracy in the region.

The next two panelists will move the discussion to the twentieth century by focusing on Manuel Zapata Olivella and Abdias do Nascimento as nexuses of literary and performative dialogue between Colombia and Brazil. In “A Tale of Two African Congresses: Reading the Diasporic Labor of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Abdias do Nascimento through their Performances,” Juan Suárez Ontoneda traces the origin of Afro-Latin socio-political activism in mid-twentieth century theater in Colombia and Brazil. Suárez demonstrates that while Zapata Olivella and Nascimento had a long friendship throughout their lives, their activist interventions indicate that blackness and the African diaspora had very different political stakes in their respective countries.

John Maddox will continue the conversation of twentieth and twenty-first-century Afro-Latin identities in “Quilombos in the Novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves.” Through a comparison of two monumental historical novels—Zapata Olivella’s Changó el gran putas (1983) and Gonçalves’s Um defeito de cor (2006)—Maddox foregrounds the ongoing tradition of “quilombismo” in Afro-Latin American literary culture. As Maddox demonstrates, quilombismo, or the celebration of the history of Brazilian runaway slave communities, began with Abdias do Nascimento and continues to influence Afro-Latin literary imaginaries to this day.

In the final presentation, Melissa Schindler will offer a comprehensive analysis of the role that literary anthologies have played in the construction of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Colombian identities. Although the practice of collecting literary works began in Latin America around the same time as it did for African-American intellectuals, Afro-Latin anthologies served different purposes. Unlike in the U.S., anthologizing the work of afro-descendant writers in Latin America is an act of reclaiming black writers from historical erasure through widespread processes of social whitening. The presentation will conclude with an emphasis on the particular significance that anthologies hold for Afro-Latin American women writers.

Inspired by the 2020 Presidential Theme, our session takes up the question of how language and culture shape definitions of Afro-descendant identities in Latin America and exposes overlooked connections between the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas.