Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: "The Insidious Pleasures of Iberian American Harmless Narratives" with Evelyne Laurent-Perrault (Assistant Professor, UC Santa Barbara)

Please join the Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone research group for a talk by Evelyne Laurent-Perrault (Retired Assistant Professor, UC Santa Barbara) titled "The Insidious Pleasures of Iberian American Harmless Narratives." Laurent-Perrault is a retired Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and a historian of the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on Venezuela.

Abstract:
The paper will present a very succinct historical trajectory of the processes of Blackness devaluation in Spanish America, the anxiety the possibility and reality of abolition created as enslavers refused to partner with the formally enslaved, noting moments of erasure of Blackness through 20th-century Venezuela's foundational literature. It will note how these ideas have been in our narratives for so long that have become part of our psyche that they may lay normalized in our sub-sub-conscious, create the idea that it is perfectly normal and harmless to laugh at and insult Blackness, and that at the end of the day, insulting Blackness is irrelevant because individuals read as Black cannot feel or think. The paper will propose a hypothesis from where to read these manifestations of anti-Blackness in Venezuela as strategy to educate a larger community about it.

Please RSVP for the Race and Gender talk by Evelyne Laurent-Perrault