Reading Race, Images, and Archives II
Reading Race, Images, and Archives II, coordinated by Erica Feild-Marchello and Andrea Rueda Herrera, is a series of three seminars bringing together researchers and activists from Spain, the United States, and the UK. Building on ideas and questions from Reading Race Images and Archives (Jan-March 2024), these sessions respond to practical concerns for conducting research on race and Blackness in early modern Iberian contexts.
This series will open with a discussion, convened by Jeanne Rosine Abomo Edou (Washington University in Saint Louis), on the artistic and activist practices of Agnes Essonti (https://essonti.com/Info) and Rubén Bermúdez (https://www.rubenhbermudez.com/). It will provide an opportunity to exchange ideas about how activists and researchers can enrich one another’s projects.
The second seminar will take the shape of a reading group to debate texts that ask us to think deeply about our approaches to the archive, in particular for research on Blackness and racial formations. The texts that will form the foundation of our discussion are:
- Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Programme Criticism 12.2 (2008): 1-14. If you are already familiar with “Venus in Two Acts,” and would like to check out more recent writing by Hartman, please see “Intimate History, Radical Narrative”, The Journal of African American History (2021), pp. 127-135.
- Imtiaz Habib, “Introduction”, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible, pp. 1-18.
- Eduardo França Paiva, “Introducción”, Nombrar lo nuevo. Una historia léxica de Iberoamérica entre los siglos XVI y XVIII, pp. 23-31.
The third seminar will feature a roundtable discussion with Dr. Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University), Dr. Cassander Smith (University of Alabama), Dr. Cornesha Tweede (Arizona State University), and Dr. Elizabeth Wright (University of Georgia), who will reflect on different ways to tackle challenges that arise when writing about race and Blackness in the early modern period. Special attention will be dedicated to questions regarding language and terminology, and the approaches that the discussants worked out through the edition of the special issue of the Bulletin of the comediantes “Recovering Black Performance.”
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.