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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
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

In its dealings with the literary production of the African diaspora in Spain, the project was dedicated to a new field of research in Romance studies that has only recently received attention. Against the backdrop of the discussion about migration from Africa and the debate about new views of Europe from a postcolonial perspective, it investigated Hispanophone literature written by African and Afrodescendant authors whose texts negotiate Afrodiasporic realities, community designs and identity constructions in the field of tension between homeland and hostland. These realities are characterized by extensive exclusion and racism experiences of the Afrodiasporic subject in European societies. Furthermore, those authors describe multiple affiliations and envision alternative communities that shape the survival knowledge of Afrodiasporic subjects and situate them with regard to a transnational African diaspora. In addition to the literary corpus, other medial forms of expression such as films, digital platforms, photo books and other cultural artifacts were also included to explore (self-)positionings beyond literature. The very heterogeneous field of Spanish-language Afro-diasporic literature includes authors from the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea as well as those from non-Spanish-speaking countries, such as Benin, Senegal and Cameroon, who have adopted Spanish as their literary language - mostly in the course of their own migration experience. In addition, this corpus encompasses authors of African origin who move between Europe and Africa as well as a new generation of Afrodescendant authors who were born or grew up in Spain and have increasingly appeared on the literary stage in recent years. The project drew on new approaches from diaspora studies, that, in the context of postcolonial studies and recent research on migration, consider diasporic communities as transnational formations in the sense of imagined communities within which people relate less to a common geographical homeland than to a shared history of exclusion, alliances and resistance. As the project showed, the subjects’ localizations and self-positionings in the texts take place within a symbolic multipolar reference space of Afrodescendence, which is conceptualized through shared narratives, cultural reference systems, symbols, intertexts, etc. and characterized by a continuous (re-)negotiation of plural affiliations into which both transnational and local spaces of experience and knowledge systems flow. At the same time, the project made an important contribution to inscribing Spain as a space into Afro-European Studies, which deal with Afrodiasporic people and communities in Europe, their cultures, literatures, theories and history from a comparative perspective. Through numerous and diverse activities in both European and non-European contexts (including academic lectures, section leadership, organization of conferences, cultural events), this project has substantially contributed to increasing the visibility of the Afrodiasporic community in Spain and its literary production within the international research landscape.

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