Reading Race, Images, and Archives

Reading Race, Images, and Archives, coordinated by Erica Feild-Marchello and Andrea Rueda Herrera, is a series of three seminars bringing together researchers from Spain, the United States, and the UK. The sessions are meant to respond to practical concerns for conducting research on race and Blackness in early modern Iberian contexts. The themes of each seminar were developed in response to interests identified by members of the Making of Blackness research team. 

This series will open with a seminar stylized as a reading and discussion group that will reflect on and debate three recent publications that address foundational questions and research approaches in the field of early modern studies of race and Blackness: Smith, Jones, and Grier, «Introduction: The Contours of a Field», in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, and Miles P. Grier (Springer International Publishing, 2018); García-Arenal y Pereda, «Introducción», en De sangre y leche: raza y religión en el mundo ibérico moderno, ed. by Mercedes García-Arenal, and Felipe Pereda (Marcial Pons, 2021); Ndiaye, Noémie «Introduction», Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race(U Penn Press, 2022).

The second seminar will offer a discussion with scholar of visual culture, Anna Espínola-Lynn (University of Oxford), on how to approach visual materials for research on race and Blackness in the early modern period and a reflection on how museums and other institutions navigate related questions in the present day.

The third seminar invites Amanda Lima (University of Oxford) and a team of historians with expertise in key archives for research on early modern Iberian worlds and interest in questions relating to race and other categories of difference for a round table discussion. This will include a collaborative Q&A session where attendees will be able to pose and resolve practical doubts that arise when approaching the archives and identify tools for working through theoretical doubts.   

Attendance requires access links, but is open to new participants who can request information and links from the organizers by writing to makingofblackness@gmail.com.

This activity is a result of the project I+D+i PID2021-124893NA-I00: The Making of Blackness, A Process of Cultural and Social Negotiation from the Bottom-Up, funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033.