el taller presents: To Cervantes with Love: Cervantine Blackness

Dear friends and colleagues,

Please join us in New York on Wednesday, February 5th at 7:00PM for our first event of 2025, a book launch roundtable for Nicholas R. Jones’s eagerly awaited Cervantine Blackness. The roundtable, which is in-person only and will not be recorded, will take place at the Espacio de Culturas @ KJCC (53 Washington Square South, New York, NY). The event is free and open to the public. Please register at this link to attend.

This book launch roundtable is an exploration into the depths of Miguel de Cervantes’s portrayal of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa, through a dialogue with Nicholas R. Jones’s latest scholarly work, Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024). Nicholas R. Jones, known for his multi-awarded book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, which has significantly transformed the discourse on Blackness within early modern Iberian and broader Hispanic studies, will serve as the respondent. With Cervantine Blackness, Jones challenges entrenched paradigms and inviting a reevaluation of the complexities surrounding Black identities in Cervantes’s literary corpus. By recalibrating the focus from conventional narratives of “agency” and “resistance” to a nuanced understanding of Black subjects within Cervantes’s works, Jones sets the stage for a roundtable discussion that is anticipated to be transformative. Through systematic deconstruction of long-standing prejudices, this dialogue seeks to forge new paths in literary and cultural criticism, challenging the participants and audience alike to rethink the portrayal of Blackness in early modern literature and, more importantly, its implications for contemporary discourse.

Participants:

• Eva María Copeland (Dickinson College)

• David Sterling Brown (Trinity College)

• Monica Styles (Howard University)

• Aurélie Vialette (Yale University)

• Emily Wilbourne (Graduate Center/Queens C, CUNY)

Respondent: Nicholas R. Jones (Yale U)
Moderated by: Víctor Sierra Matute (Baruch, CUNY)

Keep an eye out for more details on our upcoming events. We are busy working on exciting programming for the spring semester. Look out for future emails or visit wp.nyu.edu/eltaller for further information. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

The el taller coordinating committee is excited to introduce our new graduate coordinator, Sandra Baena Velázquez. Sandra is a first-year PhD Student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU and will take over future el taller organization and communications. Welcome, Sandra!

Thank you very much, y nos vemos pronto.

Luke Bowe
Sandra Baena Velázquez

On behalf of the coordinating committee

Abigail Balbale
Jordana Mendelson
Sarah Pearce
Víctor Sierra Matute
Ameya Tripathi

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