“Futures of Resilience: Contemporary Afro-Latin American Literature” explores how Black writers from South America and the Caribbean engage historical memory to shape alternative futures. Focusing primarily on Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico, the panel will address the pressing question: How do contemporary Afro-Latin American literatures envision resilience amid histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial struggle? As a part of the burgeoning field of Afro-Latin American Studies, this panel helps to pursue the animating issues that define the field. As Latin American Studies continues to study the Africanist presence in the New World, more fully, the literature and expressive cultures of Blacks across the Caribbean, Central, and South America are becoming more visible. Afro-Latin American Studies: an Introduction (eds. Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews), Routledge Handbook of Afro-Latin American Studies (eds. Bernd Reiter and John Antón Sánchez), and Afro-Latin America: 1800-2000 (George Reid Andrews), to name only a few titles, represent some of the most recent advancements in scholarship. This panel will build on this foundational scholarship by focusing more precisely on prominent Afro-Latin American writers: namely Ana Maria Gonçalves, Mayra Santos Febres, and Ale Santos.

More specifically, the paper by Professor Oliveira-Monte will study how Brazilian Afrofuturistic prose depicts destroyed worlds to set out to build new worlds based on ancestralidade (ancestrality), solidarity, and collectivity. Within an apocalyptic landscape, Afro-Brazilian hero characters seek to return to their African roots, while fighting to establish social and economic justice. In this paper, she studies Ale Santos’s O último ancestral (The Last Ancestor, 2021), examining how Yoruba culture plays a significant role in rebuilding a new world out of an apocalyptic futuristic society.

The paper by Letícia Barbosa explores colonial Black girlhood in Ana Maria Gonçalves’s novel, Um Defeito de Cor(2006), focusing on the protagonist Kehinde’s childhood experiences under slavery in Brazil. Ultimately, this study underscores Gonçalves’s significant contribution to feminist and diaspora literary studies by centering the overlooked formative experiences of enslaved Black girls, challenging their historical erasure in Brazilian literature and historiography.

The paper by Eduardo Febres examines how digital archives are reshaping the recovery of Afro-Latin American intellectual traditions and, in doing so, participate in the envisioning of resilient futures. Focusing on community-driven collections and transatlantic networks, the paper explores how digital curation practices engage with historical memory to resist erasure and affirm Black cultural presence across the Americas. By analyzing specific archival initiatives —from grassroots repositories to institutional platforms — the paper considers how questions of data sovereignty, access, and ethical representation inform the construction of digital memory. Ultimately, the paper argues that these archival practices not only preserve Afro-Latin American histories but also propose models of cultural resilience rooted in collective agency, technological self-determination, and critical care for the past. This approach highlights the role of digital methodologies in crafting alternative futures attentive to the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and ongoing racial struggle.

The paper by Professor Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves examines how combining the neo-historical novel and autofiction in, The Other Julia, by Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres, serves to depict the life of an icon of Puerto Rican literature, the poet Julia de Burgos. As a neo-historical novel, the work rescues forgotten memories and stories, analyzes class/racial and gender dynamics, and recognizes the importance of the diaspora.

Each panelist will present for no more than fifteen minutes, leaving fifteen minutes for questions and answers.

This panel reflects a diversity of voices in that it includes scholars of color, women scholars, two graduate students, and scholars from both Research-1 and teaching institutions.