Parry Lecture with Larissa Brewer García (U Chicago): “The Contested Exemplarity of Black Upward Mobility in Colonial Peru.”

Larissa Brewer-García, specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the African diaspora. Within these areas, her interests include gender studies, literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism, and translation studies.

She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the Franke Institute in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She currently holds a three-year Ivy+ Mellon Leadership fellowship.

She is a co-editor at Critical Inquiry and a co-founder, with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Cécile Fromont, of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture. She is also part of the Faculty Committee of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University’s international seminar Afro-Latin American Art: Building the Field.

Her first book, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines the influence of black interpreters and spiritual intermediaries in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. The book was awarded the Flora Tristán Book Prize for Peruvian Studies by the Latin American Studies Association and the Friedrich Katz Prize for Latin American and Caribbean history by the American Historical Association. The Spanish translation of Beyond Babel by George Palacios, titled Más allá de Babel: La traducción de lo negro en Perú y la Nueva Granada en el siglo XVII, was published by Planeta/ Uniandes in 2022.

Her current book project, "Unruly Examples: Race, Hierarchy, and Belonging in Colonial Andean Religious Portraiture" examines depictions of Black and Indigenous men and women in narrative, verse, and visual culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Paulina L. Alberto, is a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work explores the intersections of ideas of race and nation in Latin America, with a focus on how Afro-Latin Americans have shaped and contested the region's ideologies of racial inclusiveness in their ongoing struggles for recognition and equality.

Alberto’s latest single-authored work is Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Black Legend reconstructs both the life story of and the legends surrounding Raúl Grigera, a Black celebrity and icon of the Buenos Aires nightlife in the early 1900s. It examines the role of “racial storytelling” in constructing Whiteness and Blackness in post-independence Argentina and the power of racial stories to shape the fates of individuals, communities, and nations. Alberto’s first book, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), charts the changing terms through which self-defined Black intellectuals in three major Brazilian cities negotiated the meanings of racial inclusiveness in their multi-racial nation, and the place of people of African descent within it, between 1920 and 1980. Her co-edited volume Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (with Eduardo Elena, Cambridge University Press, 2016) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that newly places twentieth- and twenty-first century Argentina in conversation with the literature on race and nation in Latin America more broadly. Her most recent co-edited work, with George Reid Andrews and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, is Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers of Latin America (1870-1960) (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a volume of selected articles from the historical Black presses of Latin America, annotated and translated for English-language audiences.

Her work, translated widely into Spanish and Portuguese, has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among other institutions.  Terms of Inclusion has been recognized with the Roberto Reis Prize for Best Book in Brazilian Studies and the Warren Dean Prize for Best Book in Brazilian History.  Black Legend was awarded the Bolton-Johnson Prize for the Best Book in Latin American History, the Socolow-Johnson Prize for the Best Book on Chile-Río de la Plata History, and the LASA Southern Cone Section Prize for Best Book in the Social Sciences.  An article from the same project received the James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize for Best Article in the Hispanic American Historical Review. 

Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Alberto taught in the departments of History and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.  Her teaching has included courses on Latin American history; comparative race, racial ideologies, and racial narratives in Brazil, Argentina, and Afro-Latin America; the borderlands of history and fiction; and the history and philosophy of History.

Alejandro de la Fuente, is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente’s works on race, slavery, law, art, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020, coauthored with Ariela J. Gross), Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), published in Spanish as Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba, 1900-2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), winner of the Southern Historical Association’s 2003 prize for “best book in Latin American history.” He is the coeditor, with George Reid Andrews, of Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2018, available in Spanish and Portuguese) and of the “Afro-Latin America” book series, Cambridge University Press.

Professor de la Fuente is also the curator of three art exhibits dealing with issues of race and the author or editor of their corresponding volumes: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Havana-Pittsburgh-New York City-Cambridge, Ma, 2010-12); Drapetomania: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba (Santiago de Cuba-Havana-New York City-Cambridge, Ma-San Francisco-Philadelphia-Chicago, 2013-16) and Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present (Cambridge, Ma-Miami, ongoing).

Professor de la Fuente is the founding Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and the faculty Chair of the Cuba Studies Program, DRCLAS. He is also the Senior Editor of the journal Cuban Studies.