The Black Literary Tradition and Bartolomé de las Casas’ History of the Indies

Please join us for a work-in-progress lunch with Monica Styles, assistant professor of Spanish at Howard University and current faculty research fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center. Professor Styles will discuss her book manuscript, Recuperating Black Perspectives: Early Modern Caribbean Afro-Intertextuality.

Professor Styles’ book contributes to a growing body of scholarship addressing critical blind spots in colonial Latin American literary studies concerning Black agency. She develops the concept of Afro-intertextuality to reveal how Black voices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts shaped colonial literary cultures in the Spanish Caribbean. Using critical Black theory and Black feminist theory, she traces how fragments of Black perspectives in texts composed by European-descent authors belong to a broader Black literary tradition. When read together, these fragments alter, muddle, and disrupt the dominant Eurocentric narratives of White colonial authors.

Monica Styles, assistant professor of Spanish at Howard University, is a faculty research fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center for spring 2025. Her research focuses on representations of Africans and people of African descent in Caribbean and Latin American literature from the early modern to modern periods.

Co-sponsored by Whitney Humanities Center and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese