Articles

Autumn, 1640.

In 2013, reading from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s His­toria ver­dadera de la Con­quista de la Nueva España, for a graduate seminar about colonial cities and fes­tivals led by my soon-to-be adviser, Lisa Voigt, I came across a line – just one line – that men­tions a pro­cession of “more than fifty” Black men, women, and children led by “their king and queen.” Intrigued by this passage, I began the research that ulti­mately led to my first book, Sov­ereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640.

Sarah Quesada’s The African Her­itage of Latinx and Caribbean Lit­er­ature offers a shift in Latin American and Latinx lit­erary studies by priv­i­leging the African archive.

A few years ago, when I was in my senior year of college to obtain a degree in Spanish lit­er­ature, I was assigned to read the 1958 novel The Empty Book (in Spanish, El libro vacío) by Josefina Vicens for a seminar on con­tem­porary Mexican literature.

Educada en un sistema fun­da­mentado en el movimiento decolonial, como cualquier joven africano francófono nacido en los años 90, me interesaban mucho las cues­tiones rela­cionadas con la negritud, la iden­tidad del sujeto pos­colonial y la com­prensión de los prob­lemas que rodean a la Françafrique.

This book is divided into three parts.

Ore entendés une chosete                     Petite qui est nou­velete Que je veuil de droiture dire.

First, I will suggest a short intro­duction on the ide­o­logical context of the complex history of cus­tomary law in France.

OLYMPE: Stop laughing!

I will start in medias res with an incident that doesn’t appear in my book but might have: a witch­craft epi­demic in Basque country in 1612.