In recent years, research on Afro-Spanish literature has gained momentum to study how people of African descent in Spain deal with racialization, re-appropriate the narrative of who they are, and negotiate Afro-Spanish identity constructions. However, given the massive rise of information communication technologies and the evolution of what has been called the web 2.0, Afro-Spaniards do not just write printed books anymore. Recently, more and more people of African descent in Spain have started to raise their voices online and engage in what Odome in recent talks has called “afrocyberactivism”. There are a soaring number of digital platforms that enable them to become active agents in their own representations and use digital storytelling as a technology of self-construction. But these platforms have rarely been studied so far which is why the subject of the special session is of utmost topicality.
The session aims at investigating how African and Afrodescendant writers, artists and activists in Spain use the internet to participate in knowledge production and tell their own stories, exploring the subversive power of these stories as well as the challenges of these discursive interventions. As literary and cultural studies scholars, we place a particular emphasis on the poetic strategies of digital self-positionings, studying not only what is said but how it is said (e.g. shared narrative structures and tropes used to imagine an Afro-Spanish community online). It furthermore draws from the ongoing debate on “digital diaspora” as a field that investigates how digital networks and social media play a crucial role in the context of diasporic community building. In this context, we will ask how Afro-Spanish identities are imagined in a continuum between the online and the offline world giving rise to transmedial articulations of blackness that echo imaginaries of Afro-Spanishness to be found in other spheres as well (e.g. literary market, cultural events, press).
The special session will have four speakers will have 12 minutes to present their work, then there will be 15 minutes of Q&A.We will ensure strict time management in the session to allow for enough time for the discussion. The session includes scholars of different academic career stages from US and European universities. The two chairs have extensive experience in the field of research on Black Spain, having published books and articles on the topic and organized numerous academic events yet.
The individual talks cover a wide array of different digital formats (interview series on video channels, blogs/vlogs, Instagram profiles and performance videos posted on YouTube) and important Afro-Spanish key figures and activist initiatives. Julia Borst (U Bremen) investigates the video interviews series AfroMayores and Nadie nos ha dado vela en este entierro, initiated among others by Afro-Spanish author and activist Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio. She explores how these audiovisual archives act as repositories of history, knowledge and memory of the Afro-Spanish community and articulate a multifaceted narrative of the historical and current Black presence in Spain. Oana Alexan Katz (Northwestern U) analyzes Rioko Fotabon’s Instagram account Black Rainbow, where they publish antiracist queer content to challenge a white supremacist, colonial, cisnormative, heteronormative Spain. Katz explores how the trans Afro-Spaniard uses social networks to actively theorize a Black Spanish trans decolonial feminist politics as a distinct epistemology. In his talk, Alfonso Bartolomé (Virginia State U) offers a decolonial reading of actor and comedian Asaari Bibang’s performances uploaded on YouTube, exploring humor as a tool of resistance to racism in contemporary Spanish society. Bartolomé’s object of investigation exemplarily shows how the analog and the digital inextricably intermingle in a postdigital world in which the analog and the virtual sphere keep converging. Finally, Alison Posey (Duke U) explores how writer and digital content creator Desirée Bela-Lobedde performs Afro-Spanish identity on her blogs acting as a “digital griot”. Studying the narrative strategies Bela-Lobedde uses to shape her online self-representations, Posey argues that the vlogger molds a mediated and mediatized self in her videos that gives rise to a dynamic and resonant digital identity as a Black woman in Spain. The variety of topics in these talks will allow us sketch the newly emerging field of Afro-Spanish cyberactivism, a field that makes us gain new insights into the spheres of political participation and knowledge production of minoritized groups in Europe.