For Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley, the Black Diaspora is an analytic category that enables the theorizing of Black culture beyond historical and national divisions (14). Complicating their viewpoint, in his introduction to New African Diasporas, Khalid Koser points out that “[a] preoccupation with slavery and its descendants has diverted our attention away from striking new patterns and processes associated with recent migrations” (3). Koser’s position resonates with that of Brent Hayes Edwards who claims, “[t]he use of the term diaspora forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor” (13).

This panel explores topics related to the Black Diaspora beyond the context of the United States. In examining legacies of chattel slavery, along with scrutinizing what philosopher Frantz Fanon has termed “the fact of blackness” in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific contexts, this session will enrich research on race and the Black Diaspora and expose participants to insights from authors, activists, and scholars who examine Blackness and the Black Diaspora in the Spanish-speaking world. This panel broadens research on race and racism to explore the cultural logics producing racialized subjects in the Global Hispanophone all while acknowledging the Iberian Peninsula’s undeniable influence in creating racist hierarchies as a colonizing nation that abused the labor of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Lennie Amores’s paper “Beyond Shackles and Homeland: Revisiting Spain’s African Diaspora” explores what Baltasar Fra-Molinero has termed “the suspect whiteness of Spain.” Her paper discusses how invocations of Diaspora in Spanish cultural studies unwittingly reproduce the racist rhetoric that turns Black people into troubled specters and zombies. While sociological scholarship asserts that metaphors of natural disasters compare immigration to destruction, Iberian Studies scholarship describes Blackness as a destructive ontology that escapes its shackles. Even if the hauntological framework functions well to represent a historical past hidden to qualify Spain as a European nation, the approach similarly undermines the contributions of Afro-descendants in contemporary Spain.

Diana Arbaiza notes that Saidiya Hartman has bemoaned the scarcity of African narratives of enslavement, regretting “the silence of the archive” in contrast with “the robustness of the barracoon” (3). While there are no African accounts of slavery practices in the Spanish territories of the Gulf of Guinea, Arbaiza’s paper “Archival Noise: Tracing African Captivity in Spanish Colonial Texts about Equatorial Guinea,” explores what the Spanish colonial archive reveals about captivity in the Gulf of Guinea during the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on travel narratives and memoirs by Spanish colonizers and official documents from the 1840s to the 1880s, Arbaiza examines the epistemological limits of this archive in her pursuit of what she terms “archival noise,” moments in which evidence emerges “against the grain” of authorial intention (Stoler 2010).

Thenesoya Martín de la Nuez examines the Black Diaspora through an engagement with what she terms oceanic border regimes. Martín de la Nuez compares a Puerto Rican collection of poems on undocumented immigration, Boat People (2005), by Afro-Caribbean writer Mayra Santos Febres, and a short story set on a slave ship in the Middle Passage, “La travesía” (1977), by Equatoguinean author Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo. In turning to postcolonial maritime spaces linked by the legacy of transatlantic violence, she engages with Afro-diasporic and diachronic displacements. In her study, displacement in its various forms produce oceanic border regions, which Martín de la Nuez theorizes using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of slow violence.

Often described as a country haunted by the silences and war, Colombia is a nation whose “internal armed conflict” largely obscures the root cause of the violence: the specter of racial slavery. The mutual imbrication of the “fast” violence associated with armed conflict and the “slow” violence of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” is especially apparent in the overrepresentation of Black people among Colombia’s notoriously high population of internally displaced persons. Mathilda Shephard’s paper considers the visual politics of representing Black experiences of forced displacement through the mnemonic iconography of bondage, commercial shipping and the plantation. Drawing upon theoretical approaches to Afro-diasporic afterlives that situate contemporary anti-Black violence within palimpsestic geographies of racialized dispossession, Shepherd examines the dialectics of des/arraigo (rootedness/being uprooted) in multimedia artist Liliana Angulo’s photographic and video installations.

Through these interventions, this session Afro-Diasporic Afterlives & Archipelagos Across the Global Hispanophone aims to contribute to a growing corpus of scholarly works and interventions that debate the Black Diaspora beyond the long-established framework of the Anglo-Atlantic.