The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last 50 years. It challenges dominant narratives in world literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa’s impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century ‘scramble for Africa,’ the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.
Sarah M. Quesada (PhD Stanford) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and by courtesy of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and an affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University. Her first book, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge UP 2022), privileges African history and epistemology to address the global reach of Latinx writing and its legacy as a world literature. Her published work focuses on comparative readings of Latinx, African, and Latin American literatures. Her work engages colonial archival and field work across the Global South. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Small Axe, American Quarterly, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies, and Cambridge’s Latinx Literature in Transition, 1898-1992, among other places. She serves on the Executive Committee for the Modern Languages Association’s Anthropology and Literature Forum and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. She is a former ACLS Andrew Mellon fellow and has also served as the chair of the Latino Studies section for the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). She is currently writing a second book on Cold War era politics of internationalism and decolonization in African Francophone, Latin American and Latinx writing.
Moderator: Jesse Hoffnung-Gaarskof
In collaboration with Cuba Studies Program, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
IAP-UAM Lecture is a yearly event sponsored by the IAP-UAM Program with support from Fundación Asisa.
