The Spanish Black Diaspora: Afro-Spanish Literature of the 20th and 21st Century

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Borst
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 353492083

The current debate about African migrants apart, neither historically nor currently has the presence of African people in Europe been given much attention. With its focus on imageries of Afro-diasporic communities in Europe, this project, using Spain as an example, is dedicated to a completely new research area. It will investigate Afro-Spanish literature of the last 30 years i.e. texts from Sub-Saharan African authors publishing in Spanish who live in Spain and/or cover diasporic experiences and the realm of Afro-Europe in their writings. In addition to authors from the former Spanish colony Equatorial Guinea, this barely tapped corpus also includes those from non-Spanish speaking countries, who (generally in the course of their own migratory experience) have embraced Spanish as a literary language. Besides the literary corpus (especially novels and lyrics), other media such as films, blogs, social networks, and cultural performances will be included in the analysis, thus enabling a consideration of how Afro-Spanish communities are conceptualized in texts and media beyond literary writing.The research will investigate how a communal experience as "the Black Others" within this heterogeneous Spanish Black Diaspora is articulated in Afro-Spanish texts. Narratological, semiotic, discourse analytical and media analytical approaches will be used to answer the following key questions:1) Related to subject and community: How do the texts approach a binary view of Self and the Other? In what form do the texts negotiate diasporic identities that are based on the experiencing of cultural difference and transcultural realms of experience? Do they conceive of new forms of community in the diaspora? To what extent are static subject positions replaced by a continuous bargaining of plural belongings, allowing the Afro-Spanish subject to continually re-position her- or himself in and between Europe and Africa?2) Related to concepts of difference: How are positive transcultural communal scenarios and historical and current experiences of repression and marginalization of people of African descent portrayed in these texts? How does this ambivalent transcultural borderland arise; a borderland that challenges differences and involves moments of resistance, but one that simultaneously never quite settles the contradictions of multiple belongings?3) Related to aesthetic strategies in narrating diasporic experience: Which communal imaginaries are referred to? Which literary strategies and narratives provide enough complexity to articulate the ambivalences of diasporic existence? How do the texts display the intertwined, superimposed and/or contradictory voices and belongings?The aims are a first, extensive presentation of the topic in a monograph and the instigation of a new research area in Romance Studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants