Africa in Iberia: Memories, Genealogies, and Geographies in Early Modernity

Africa in Iberia: Memories, Genealogies, and Geographies in Early Modernity is a three-day international research symposium organised by Diana Berruezo-Sánchez (ADHUC-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Manuel Olmedo Gobante (University of Arkansas) and Cornesha Tweede (Arizona State University). 

The study of Africa within the early modern period includes the geography and peoples of the entire continent, including West, Central and East Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. The European perspective fragmented African areas and identities to understand them in categories still used today. How do we challenge this fragmentation? How was Africa, partially or wholly, conceptualized and discussed in early modern Iberia? How did Afro-Iberians remember Africa? How were social and cultural worldviews formed from the rich and complicated histories of Africa and Iberia? With these questions in mind, Africa in Iberia seeks to understand Africa’s role in early modern Portugal and Spain through a lens focused on discourses, relations, transactions, and social practices, and to foster a discussion on how Africans and Afro-descendants actively shaped and were shaped by the era’s racial thinking. Africa in Iberia will explore how early modern Iberian people conceptualized, envisioned, discussed, and remembered Africa and Africanness both geographically and culturally, and explore the active contributions of Black people and other racialized communities to Iberian society and culture.

The symposium brings together researchers from the United States, the UK, Spain and Africa to explore African Kinship, Ethnicity, and Origins in the Iberian Archive; Travelers, Captives, Refugees, and Other Forms of Human Migration; Mudejar/Morisco/North African Communities and Identities; Black Performance and Cultural Representations of Blackness; Iberian Cartographies of Africa; Mediterranean or Trans-Atlantic Networks of Trade; and Early Modern Ideas on Race. 

The keynote addresses will be given by Noémie Ndiaye (The University of Chicago), Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University) and Baltasar Fra-Molinero (Bates College) 

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.