Postcolonial Spatialities with Sarah Quesada

Please join us as Sarah Quesada discusses her monograph, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022), which unearths a buried African archive within widely-read writers of Latin American descent from the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in world literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa’s impact in broader Latin American culture, arguing that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. Quesada's work shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern narratives of 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. Bridging African, Latinx, and Latin American studies over a forty-year period, this is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of a broader Latinx literature.