The expanding archive
By Santiago Acosta | Published on October 2, 2023
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. Moving away from Eurocentric narratives and perspectives, the book seeks to reconfigure our understanding of established global frameworks—including the transnational, the cosmopolitan, and World Literature—through a lens that distinctly emphasizes the Atlantic system’s impacts in Africa. In doing so, Quesada offers a fresh perspective on the intertwined legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and literature within the Latin America–Africa axis.
In Quesada’s work, the definition of “archive” stretches beyond its conventional boundaries. The archive itself expands, ceasing to be a delineated space, an inside detached from what might be deemed non-essential. Rather, it encompasses a vast network of practices, physical memorials, traces, and places. It is also a living repository of practices, beliefs, habits, and dispositions. The archive can be present in a monument, a tree, a painting, or even a single word. Crucially, the archive actively challenges and resists its potential disappearance. It responds, it talks back against its own erasure.
I’m curious about how Quesada’s understanding of “the archive” might have evolved during her research and writing. How did she come to confront the problem of the archive? Could the “physical memorials” of the slave trade be integrated into a broader, more expansive understanding of the archive? Or do they serve as a counter-archive, pushing back against the narratives of official history? How does a scholar’s approach evolve in light of these increasingly fluid notions of archives, memory sites, and textual monuments?
An exploration of the archives of African colonization not only combats the forces that have historically distanced Latin America from Africa but also interrogates the traditional divide between empirical and critical-theoretical methodologies. Given this context, what new methodologies surface? And how might our scholarly work support broader practices of “unlearning” the historical whiteness of Latinidad, of the transnational, of World Literature, of mestizaje?
Quesada’s work underscores the need for the continued exploration of diasporic exchanges, urging us to delve deeper into the past and present archives of Latin-Africa.
