Please join us on Thursday, Feb. 11, at 3:30 pm (EST) and Friday, Feb. 12, at 4 pm (EST) for a seminar and lecture on "Cervantine Blackness." In this exciting new approach to the study of Black and African-descendant figures in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Nick Jones argues for a more nuanced critical reckoning with the historical, literary, and cultural legacies of anti-Blackness within the Iberian peninsula and the global reaches of the Spanish empire. Please find registration links, readings, and an abstract for the lecture below.
Nick Jones, the Spring 2021 Gerszten Family Visiting Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, is a leading scholar in the study of Black history, literature, and culture in the early modern Iberian world. He is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Affiliate Faculty in Latin American Studies at Bucknell University. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State UP, 2019), winner of the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora, the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association, and a Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. With Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier he is the co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), and, with Chad Leahy, he is the co-editor of Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge 2020). He is also the editor for Routledge's Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series. You can follow him on Twitter at @Bibliophilenick.
These events are generously sponsored by the Gerszten Family Visiting Professor fund. To see previous Gerszten-funded events, please click here: https://spanitalport.as.virginia.edu/events-0.
To register for the seminar, please click here: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rdu-rqjkrHNMGlKAHaqxnUx7QWAwyNBAA
To register for the lecture, please click here: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpdeGpqz0rH9x0vvNPDvbZuUtwilzkcGvw
To access readings for the seminar, please click here: https://ctxt.es/es/20200701/Firmas/32774/cervantes-estatua-black-lives-matter-nick-jones-chad-leahy.htm (English translation by Sarah Pearce available here)
Abstract: On Friday, July 19, 2020, against a backdrop of global protest over police violence and anti-Black racism, protestors in San Francisco’s Golden State Park defaced statues of missionary Junípero Serra and author Miguel de Cervantes. Whereas scholars generally agree on Serra’s devastating legacy in Indigenous communities, Cervantes’s record is more complex. This talk will show why scholars, students, and activists must reckon with the cultural, linguistic, and racial Blackness of Cervantes's Black subjects. In his works, their lives matter, and they force us to reconsider Cervantes as an ally in the defense of marginalized voices within a cultural and literary world that denied Black humanity. In this new approach to Cervantine Blackness, we should neither forget the voices of early modern African-descended figures nor the women and men who demand justice today with a can of spray paint in hand.
