Benita Sampedro
Benita Sampedro Vizcaya is professor of Spanish colonial studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra University. Her research engages with Spanish colonial pasts and presents, archives, and legacies, both in north and sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is invested in the study of colonial links within and beyond the frame of the multiple Spanish imperial Atlantic and global networks, and she has published extensively on the politics and processes of decolonization, colonial health and biopolitics, colonial domestic labor, colonial carceral systems, the colonial politics of meteorology, colonial archives, the intersections of gender, science and colonialism, border mobility and migration, and on the ruins of late colonial modernity.
Professor Sampedro Vizcaya has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Hispanophone Forum at the Modern Language Association (2015-2020), and currently serves on the Executive Committee on 20th and 21st Century Spanish and Iberian Languages, Literatures and Cultures Section (2021-2026). She was Vice-Director of the Centro de estudios afro-hispánicos at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid (2017-2019) and founding Associate Director of the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University (2017-2020). Since January 2021, she is Dorothy and Arthur Engle Distinguished Professor in Literature at Hofstra University.
Address: Hofstra University
Professor Sampedro Vizcaya has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Hispanophone Forum at the Modern Language Association (2015-2020), and currently serves on the Executive Committee on 20th and 21st Century Spanish and Iberian Languages, Literatures and Cultures Section (2021-2026). She was Vice-Director of the Centro de estudios afro-hispánicos at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid (2017-2019) and founding Associate Director of the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University (2017-2020). Since January 2021, she is Dorothy and Arthur Engle Distinguished Professor in Literature at Hofstra University.
Address: Hofstra University
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Books and Journal Special Issues by Benita Sampedro
Guest Editors: Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo
Introduction
01. Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Entering the Global Hispanophone: an introduction”
Articles
02. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Transiting Western Sahara”
03. Alberto López Martín, “Emplazando afectos: activismo y colectividad en las poéticas españolas y saharauis recientes”
04. Eric Calderwood, “Spanish in a global key”
05. Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, “Degrees of untranslatability: Muhammad Shukri’s quest for representation”
06. Paula C. Park, “Transpacific intercoloniality: rethinking the globality of Philippine literature in Spanish”
07. Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “Theorizing the Global Hispanophone as a dynamic of (dis)entanglement: contributions from a history of science perspective”
08. Inés Plasencia Camps, “Desde la ansiedad y la incertidumbre: relaciones sociales y versiones sobre la colonización en las primeras fotografías de Fernando Poo y sus dependencias (1861–1864)”
09. Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “Dios entre el alcohol y los rifles: Robert Hamill Nassau, historiador y misionero en el golfo de Guinea”
10. David Wacks, “Sepharadim/conversos and premodern Global Hispanism”
Book Reviews
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday
Chapter 1. Europe’s ‘Last’ Wall: Contiguity, Exchange and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the confluence of Spain and North Africa
Parvati Nair
Chapter 2. Migration, Gender, and Desire in Contemporary Spanish Cinema
Rosi Song
Chapter 3. State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism, and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism (On Mikel Azurmendi)
Joseba Gabilondo
Chapter 4. Constructing Convivencia: Miquel Barceló, José Luis Guerín, and Spanish-African Solidarity
Susan Martín Márquez
Chapter 5. Galicia Beyond Galicia: A man dos paíños and the Ends of Territoriality
Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Chapter 6. Foreignness and Vengeance: On Rizal's El Filibusterismo
Vicente Rafael
Chapter 7. Through the Eyes of Strangers: Building Nation and Political Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Alberto Medina
Chapter 8. On Imperial Archives and the Insular Vanishing Point. The Canary Islands in Viera y Clavijo’s Noticias
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián
Chapter 9. Manso de Contreras’ Relación of the Tehuantepec Rebellion (1660–1661): Violence, Counter-Insurgency Prose and the Frontiers of Colonial Justice
David Rojinsky
Chapter 11. (The) Patria Besieged: Border-Crossing Paradoxes of National Identity in Cervantes’s Numancia
Michael Armstrong
Chapter 12. Border Crossing and Identity Consciousness in the Jews of Medieval Spain Mariano
Gómez Aranda
Chapter 13. Seven Theses Against Hispanism
Eduardo Subirats
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index
Book Chapters and Journal Articles by Benita Sampedro
The presence of houseboys, cooks, motoboys, and other domestic workers was a key feature of the household for Spanish settlers in colonial West Africa (including today’s Equatorial Guinea, prior to the country’s independence from Spain in 1968), and in other colonial African settings. Concerned with social and labour history within the close confines of domestic spaces, this essay will attempt to enter into the colonizer’s home, to unpack this presence marked by gender and servitude as primal facets of colonial exploitation. It will engage with various archives—from traces of servants’ voices scattered in official documentation, to rare autobiographical sketches, to collections of photographs from private family albums—all inextricably bound to the complex relationships that defined colonial African and Spanish interactions. Although regionally defined, this study is neither purely domestic nor local, but essentially transnational: Spanish settlers did not depend on local African workers for their household labour, nor did the local Bubi, Ndowé or Fang populations easily accept subjugation to such often genderized domestic roles. Houseboys were brought in from other localities (including Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), a process tapping into much larger dynamics of twentieth-century labour recruitment networks, and into the politics of movement and mobility within the service industry in colonial West Africa.
KEYWORDS
Western Sahara; Ceuta; Melilla; Europlex; Sahara Chronicle
Guest Editors: Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo
Introduction
01. Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Entering the Global Hispanophone: an introduction”
Articles
02. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Transiting Western Sahara”
03. Alberto López Martín, “Emplazando afectos: activismo y colectividad en las poéticas españolas y saharauis recientes”
04. Eric Calderwood, “Spanish in a global key”
05. Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, “Degrees of untranslatability: Muhammad Shukri’s quest for representation”
06. Paula C. Park, “Transpacific intercoloniality: rethinking the globality of Philippine literature in Spanish”
07. Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “Theorizing the Global Hispanophone as a dynamic of (dis)entanglement: contributions from a history of science perspective”
08. Inés Plasencia Camps, “Desde la ansiedad y la incertidumbre: relaciones sociales y versiones sobre la colonización en las primeras fotografías de Fernando Poo y sus dependencias (1861–1864)”
09. Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “Dios entre el alcohol y los rifles: Robert Hamill Nassau, historiador y misionero en el golfo de Guinea”
10. David Wacks, “Sepharadim/conversos and premodern Global Hispanism”
Book Reviews
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday
Chapter 1. Europe’s ‘Last’ Wall: Contiguity, Exchange and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the confluence of Spain and North Africa
Parvati Nair
Chapter 2. Migration, Gender, and Desire in Contemporary Spanish Cinema
Rosi Song
Chapter 3. State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism, and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism (On Mikel Azurmendi)
Joseba Gabilondo
Chapter 4. Constructing Convivencia: Miquel Barceló, José Luis Guerín, and Spanish-African Solidarity
Susan Martín Márquez
Chapter 5. Galicia Beyond Galicia: A man dos paíños and the Ends of Territoriality
Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Chapter 6. Foreignness and Vengeance: On Rizal's El Filibusterismo
Vicente Rafael
Chapter 7. Through the Eyes of Strangers: Building Nation and Political Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Alberto Medina
Chapter 8. On Imperial Archives and the Insular Vanishing Point. The Canary Islands in Viera y Clavijo’s Noticias
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián
Chapter 9. Manso de Contreras’ Relación of the Tehuantepec Rebellion (1660–1661): Violence, Counter-Insurgency Prose and the Frontiers of Colonial Justice
David Rojinsky
Chapter 11. (The) Patria Besieged: Border-Crossing Paradoxes of National Identity in Cervantes’s Numancia
Michael Armstrong
Chapter 12. Border Crossing and Identity Consciousness in the Jews of Medieval Spain Mariano
Gómez Aranda
Chapter 13. Seven Theses Against Hispanism
Eduardo Subirats
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index
The presence of houseboys, cooks, motoboys, and other domestic workers was a key feature of the household for Spanish settlers in colonial West Africa (including today’s Equatorial Guinea, prior to the country’s independence from Spain in 1968), and in other colonial African settings. Concerned with social and labour history within the close confines of domestic spaces, this essay will attempt to enter into the colonizer’s home, to unpack this presence marked by gender and servitude as primal facets of colonial exploitation. It will engage with various archives—from traces of servants’ voices scattered in official documentation, to rare autobiographical sketches, to collections of photographs from private family albums—all inextricably bound to the complex relationships that defined colonial African and Spanish interactions. Although regionally defined, this study is neither purely domestic nor local, but essentially transnational: Spanish settlers did not depend on local African workers for their household labour, nor did the local Bubi, Ndowé or Fang populations easily accept subjugation to such often genderized domestic roles. Houseboys were brought in from other localities (including Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), a process tapping into much larger dynamics of twentieth-century labour recruitment networks, and into the politics of movement and mobility within the service industry in colonial West Africa.
KEYWORDS
Western Sahara; Ceuta; Melilla; Europlex; Sahara Chronicle
monograph—still appropriate for producing relevant
knowledge in our fields? Is our lack of attention to audience really something we can afford at a time when the value of the humanities is being openly questioned by those holding the purse strings? A mixed group of scholars from the fields of Iberian history and cultural studies, working in the United
States, engage in a virtual roundtable discussion.
In this second part of our two-part series on Equatorial Guinea, we're joined by Michael Ugarte and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya to take a look at the literature of this West African nation, considering everything from European travel writers to European settlers, authors from Equatorial Guinea, and women writers. We pay special attention to the subject of exilic writing and highlight a few of the country's most well-known authors along the way, including Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and María Nsué Angüe.
Our first annual Summer Institute program took place this year from July 20-23. Recordings of the roundtable and Q&A sessions are available on our web site: https://wp.nyu.edu/eltaller/video-archive/ Stay tuned for further programming!