This is the first book to interpret the African dimension of contemporary Hispanic literature. Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, is the only African country in which Spanish is an official language and which has a tradition of literature in Spanish. This is a study of the literature produced by the nation’s writers from 2007 to 2013. Since its independence in 1968, Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by dictators under whom ethnic differences have been exacerbated, poverty and violence have increased, and critical voices have been silenced. The result has been an exodus of intellectuals—including writers who express their national and exile experiences in their poems, plays, short stories, and novels. The writers discussed include Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Guillermina Mekuy, among others.

The failure to manage cultural diversity in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea in an egalitarian manner has been linked to the hallmark of colonialism. First, because the policy practiced upon Arabs and Moroccan Imazighen since the French colonization comprised one of the reasonings employed to justify the pro-Arab policies developed after independence. Second, because the discriminatory policy deployed by Spain in Equatorial Guinea, was overridden by the installation of a dictatorship that established a system of Fang predominance. This book clarifies the degree to which the Spanish colonization is responsible for the present-day management of cultural diversity in both countries.

This edited volume presents intersectionality in its various configurations and interconnections across the African continent and around the world as a concept. These chapters identify and discuss intersectionalities of identity and their interplay within precolonial, colonial, and neo-colonial constructs that develop unique and often conflicting interconnections. Scholars in this book address issues in cultural, feminist, Pan African, and postcolonial studies from interdisciplinary and traditional disciplines, including the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. While Intersectionality as a framework for race, gender, and class is often applied in African-American studies, there is a dearth of work in its application to Africa and the Diaspora. This book presents a diverse set of chapters that compare, contrast, and complicate identity constructions within Africa and the Diaspora utilizing the social sciences, the arts in film and fashion, and political economies to analyze and highlight often invisible distinctions of African identity and the resulting lived experiences. These chapters provide a discussion of intersectionality’s role in understanding Africa and the Diaspora and the intricate interconnections across its people, places, history, present, and future.

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities. This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

This book applies a comparative perspective to reconstruct the contemporary histories of Equatorial Guinea and Morocco. It explores the margins of the local Spanish cartographies to resize the effects of its colonisation in its small African empire.

The time period of 1990-2010 marks a significant moment in Spanish literary publishing that emphasized a new focus on Africa and African voices and signaled the beginning of a publishing boom of Hispano-African authors and themes. Africa in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1990-2010 analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary Spanish novel. Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, Mahan L. Ellison analyzes the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions at the turn of the twenty-first century. Heexamines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by novelists such as Lorenzo Silva, Concha López Sarasúa, Ramón Mayrata, and others. Throughout, Ellison also places the novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later.

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.