Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain
The first book-length study to address the impact of the legacies of slavery on Spanish cultural representations and institutions.
Description
This groundbreaking volume explores how culture produced in Spain, from the nineteenth century to the present, both reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained by colonialism and slavery. Akiko Tsuchiya and Aurélie Vialette bring together an outstanding group of scholars, artists, cultural producers, and activists in a range of fields—from history to literary studies, anthropology to journalism, and flamenco to film. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies, contributors address the legacies of slavery in the archive; in cultural memory sites; and in literature, music, and visual arts. How, they ask, do different cultural forms and institutions represent and reckon with this past and push for justice in the face of persistent racial discrimination? In its focus on collective memory and the cultural afterlives of slavery and antislavery, Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain will appeal not only to Iberian and Latin American specialists but also readers across Afro-Hispanic, postcolonial, transatlantic, and critical race studies.
Akiko Tsuchiya is Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. She is coeditor (with N. Michelle Murray) of Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World, also published by SUNY Press. Aurélie Vialette is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is the author of Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses, which was a 2019 recipient of the North American Catalan Society Prize for an Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan Studies.
Reviews
"Underpinned by meticulous archival sleuthing, this hard-hitting, landmark volume makes an exceptional contribution, in both depth and breadth. A number of the essays are, quite simply, stunning for their intellectual reach, historical questioning, and uncompromising engagement with our contemporary moment. Contributors not only expose the persistence of racial discrimination in our present day but also provide an indispensable foundation for re-assessing Spain's involvement in slavery in a number of locales, including London, Fernando Poo, and the Philippines. There is nothing like it on the subject." — Christine Arkinstall, author of Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship