Colonialist Gazes and Counternarratives of Blackness: Afro-Spanishness in 20th and 21st-Century Spain

Building on the growing field of Afropean Studies, this interdisciplinary and intermedial collection of essays proposes a dialogue on Afro-Spanishness that is not exclusively tied to immigration and that understands Blackness as a non-essentialist, heterogeneous and diasporic concept. Studying a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural products, some essays explore the resilience of the colonialist paradigms and the circulation of racial ideologies and colonial memories that promote national narratives of whitening. Others focus on Black self-representation and examine how Afro-Spanish authors, artists, and activists destabilize colonial gazes and constructions of national identity, propose decolonial views of Spain and Europe’s literature and history, articulate Afro-Diasporic knowledges, and envision Afro-descendance as an empowering tool.

Ana León-Távora is Associate Professor of Spanish, Director of Modern Languages and Director of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem College, in North Carolina. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters on comparative approaches to literary and artistic works as illustrations of social and political power relations. She is also the co-editor and co-translator of the bilingual critical book and catalogue on contemporary Cuban art authored by Linda Howe, Cuban Artists’ Books and Prints. Libros y Grabados de Artistas Cubanos: 1998-2008 (J La’ Verne Print Communications, 2009).

Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Entre mujeres. Política de la amistad y el deseo en la narrativa española contemporánea (Biblioteca Nueva, 2008) and the editor of two collections of essays: Black USA and Spain. Shared Memories in the 20th Century (Routledge, 2021) and Memoria colonial e inmigración. La negritud en la España posfranquista (Bellaterra, 2008). She has also co-edited Un hispanismo para el siglo XXI. Ensayos de crítica cultural (with A. Villamandos, Biblioteca Nueva, 2011). As part of her research project on women intellectuals in the press during Spain’s Transition to democracy, she published Ana María Moix: Semblanzas e impertinencias (Laetoli, 2016), an edition of Moix’s journalistic writings.