Translation, Conversion, and the Black Body in Colonial Spanish America

Larissa Brewer-García is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Chicago. She specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora in the Iberian empire. Within these areas, her research and teaching interests include the relationship between literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism in the early modern Atlantic, and translation studies. Her current book project, Beyond Babel: Translation and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Spanish America, examines the influence of black interpreters and go-betweens in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. She is also working on Saints’ Lives of the Early Black Atlantic, a translation and critical edition of hagiographies of individuals of African descent written in Spanish from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Presented by the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project in the U-M Law School and the Institute for the Humanities.