Book cover

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.

This groundbreaking volume explores how culture produced in Spain, from the 19th 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.

Reviews

“Underpinned by meticulous archival sleuthing, this hard-hitting, landmark volume makes an exceptional contribution, in both depth and breadth…. There is nothing like it on the subject.” — Christine Arkinstall, author of Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship

About the authors

Akiko Tsuchiya is professor of Hispanic studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences 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 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.