Spanish colonial history, conceived as the imperial expansion into Latin America, but also into other territories such as North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines, and Mariana Islands, has always posed the challenge of how to articulate historical accounts that can function as emancipatory narratives for the communities impacted by it. In recent years, political organizations on the extreme right like Vox in Spain or the party behind Jose Antonio Kast in Chile have vindicated an unapologetically ethnocentric celebration of Hispanidad that seeks to displace or silence the voices of the colonized. As political leaders like Javier Milei in Argentina engage in historical erasure of the most patently factual elements in the so called leyenda negra, it is incumbent upon us academics to think of ways to counter such efforts to put the wretched of the earth back in submissive positions.

This panel invites an interdisciplinary exchange between Hispanist scholars of the Early Modern period, Maghreb and diaspora scholars, and scholars of the Global Hispanophone, to provide critiques of these attempts to resuscitate anti-historicist narratives out of our darkest times, in the context of Spain’s most marginal colonial efforts. This panel specifically asks: What emancipatory narratives, if any, can come from the study of Spanish colonial presence in Algeria, Morocco, or Equatorial Guinea? How can we reread early modern texts with an eye to their more resistant or challenging possibilities? What decolonial practices from the Early Modern period can still be viable today? What perspectives of the struggle can we learn from our Arabist colleagues?