Today, almost a quarter of the whole population of Latin America identify themselves as Afro descendant. Despite their numerical and cultural relevance, Afro Latin Americans struggle to retrieve and celebrate their Black identity. In this context, literature can be considered as a vehicle of expression, a tool of socio-historical, political, cultural, and intellectual emancipation able to empower individuals and question post-colonial assumptions.
The scholars participating in this session have in common a strong interest in bridging the fields of Latin American Literature and Migration/Diaspora Studies. This panel is part of a continuous effort started at NeMLA 2022. The session that was organized by Dr. Bonino for that venue was highly attended and resulted in the establishment of a solid network of scholars interested in Afro Latin American and Afro Latinx culture. The panel that we are proposing for MLA 2023 will support this intellectual endeavor that we hope will result in an edited volume intended to be a collection of the essays presented at these two conventions.
This session is timely: Afro Latin American Literature is a field of study that is now progressively growing in an interdisciplinary and comparatist sense. Academic and art director Alejandro de la Fuente, and Afro Latin American historian George Reid Andrews are pioneers in the field of Afro Latin American culture. They coedited the first systematic volume on Afro Latin American Studies, Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (2018) and authored fundamental books on race and identity in Latin America, such as Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (2010), and Afro-Latin America: Black Lives (2016). Despite these intellectual efforts, the academic production dedicated exclusively to the analysis of Afro Latin American Literature is particularly scarce. To quote Alejandro de la Fuente, “a better knowledge of the artistic production of Afro descendants in Latin America is badly needed [...] the very existence and production of numerous artists of African descent are barely known or simply unknown [...] this is still virgin territory.” (Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction 392)
In dialogue with the current critical and theoretical production around the expanding field of Afro Latin American Literature, this session will pose the following questions: how has cultural history and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade shaped Latin American literature, and can literature support local and immigrant communities in their fight for social empowerment?
After a brief introduction of the field and a socio-cultural contextualization offered by Dr. Nicole Bonino, Olivia Lott (Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis) will open the session by discussing the literary theoretical contributions of Afro-Peruvian poet Enrique Verástegui, a foundational member of the Peruvian neo-avant-garde movement “Hora Zero”. By analyzing the ways in which Verástegui’s literature empowers new immigrant and poor classes in Lima, Lott’s goal is to recover the Afro-Peruvian poet’s centrality to Latin American vanguard.
The second presenter is Dr. Rosita Scerbo (Assistant Professor of Afro-Hispanic Studies at Georgia State University) who, by using intersectional feminist theories and critical race theory, will discuss about racial discrimination, gender subordination, and power as represented in the works of Afro-Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres. At the core of her conversation will be the legendary character of Isabel la Negra, a Black woman widely recognized as a symbol of the fight against racism and machismo in Puerto Rico.
The third and last contribution will be offered by Yvette Siegert (Ph.D. candidate at the Merton College of the University of Oxford) who will discuss issues related to informal labor economy, social mobility, and racial inequality via the literary analysis of Uruguayan writer Julio Herrera y Reissig and Colombian Ruby Rumié. By analyzing Latin American literature as a vehicle of empowerment and identity retrieval, this presentation will shed a light on a community of Afro-Colombian women from Cartagena de Indias and the ways in which their narratives are inherent to regional migration and the cultural legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
This panel session features three formal presentations conveyed through multimodal approaches. To promote discussion, each panelist will have no more than 15 minutes to present their paper. Emphasis will be put on lively interactions between the presenters and the audience. This operation will be facilitated by the presider who will pose questions to stimulate a constructive conversation.