Our proposed session addresses the question of how culture produced in the Spanish state, from the nineteenth century to the present, both reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained on colonialism and slavery. The twenty-first century has given rise to vigorous debates on the legacies of slavery in Europe and the Americas. While nations such as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands have led the way in engaging critically with the legacies of slavery, Spain has remained largely silent on this problem. Even the most recent Law of Democratic Memory (2022) has passed over the colonial question, despite the close links between Spanish colonialism and the Franco dictatorship.

Much of the vast scholarship on slavery’s impact in the Hispanic world has centered on Latin America and the Caribbean, and the early modern period in Spain. Moreover, scholarly writings on slavery and its legacies in modern Spain have been authored largely by historians, although there are significant exceptions, most notably Lisa Surwillo’s Monster’s by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. As of late, the legacies of slavery have drawn increasing interest among specialists in modern Iberian literary and cultural studies, owing to the debates provoked by recent historical memory, anti-racist, and immigrant advocacy movements inside and outside of Spain.

Our three presenters will reflect on how collective memory about slavery is brought to public consciousness through cultural production, what is at stake in these representations, and how the recovery of the untold stories through cultural forms and symbols might bring visibility to the Afro-descendant community’s place in the national history of Spain, as well as in the global history of transatlantic crossings and forced migrations.

Jeffrey K. Coleman focuses his presentation, “Memorialized Blackness: The Case of the Museo Atlántico,” on the museum as a cultural memory site. He examines the role of the Museo Atlántico in Lanzarote (Canary Islands), a space for memorializing the deaths of African migrants in the Atlantic, while evoking a parallel to the transatlantic slave trade. His analysis considers the dual purpose of the museum as a space to memorialize and erase blackness. Coleman argues that, despite the museum’s mission to create social awareness around the humanitarian crisis of contemporary migrants, its location, ecological aesthetic, and general inaccessibility undermine its purpose of commemorating black life/death, participating ultimately in the objectification of black bodies that so often pervades the media.

Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego’s presentation, “Searching for Cayetana’s Daughter: From Goya to Carmen Posadas,” examines the representation of enslaved Black children in Spanish culture, centering on the figure of an eighteenth-century child in Spain named María de la Luz, whom the thirteenth Duchess of Alba adopted and emancipated. María de la Luz appears prominently in two of Francisco de Goya’s artworks during the eighteenth century, as well as in a poem dedicated to her by the Enlightenment thinker Manuel José Quintana. Finally, in 2016 she is featured in Uruguayan-Spanish author Carmen Posadas’s novel, La hija de Cayetana. Focusing on the representation of the girl in these works, Cornejo-Parriego explores the commodification of Black bodies among the Enlightened European elites, the persistence of Africanist and Orientalizing practices, and the white savior narrative associated with the enduring discourse on Spain’s exceptionalism in relation to slavery and colonialism.

Finally, Juliana Nalerio’s paper, “From Slavery to Anti-Black Racism: Racial Ideas from Cuba and Catalonia, 1817-1933,” draws on the historical archive to trace the evolution of racial thought in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. The transatlantic relationship between Cuba and Catalonia is her point of departure for analyzing how the latter nation’s slaving past impacted how the legacies of slavery are confronted in the present. She shows how the Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery on the American continent left a profound mark on the racial ideas, concepts, and categories populating both Anglophone and Hispanophone colloquial language, as well as on legal and cultural lexical traditions.

These three presentations, in addition to demonstrating the impact of slavery in the cultural realm beyond the official end of slavery, show how culture serves as a space for representing that which was often left unspoken or concealed in public discourse. The session will be a good fit with the Presidential Theme of “visibility,” as our objective is to bring to light the legacies of slavery that have been hidden from public view. The three presentations of 15 minutes each will be followed by a brief (10-minute) response from Aurélie Vialette.