Moros y Cubanos: Medievalism and Coloniality in a 19th-Century Cuban Account of the Spanish Penal Colony in Ceuta

The FHI Graduate Working Group Latin America and Asia: Orientalisms from Colombus to Today invites you to a talk with Dr. Christina Civantos, Professor of Spanish and Arabic Studies at the University of Miami.

The legacy of the cultural encounter that took place in medieval Iberia, and the broader Orientalism that helped shape it, play a central role in the late 19th-century Cuban encounter with North Africa via Spanish colonialism. The memoir of a sergeant in the army of the Cuban independence movement, Pablo de la Concepción y Hernández, who was sentenced to Spain's military prison in the North African enclave of Ceuta for his pro-independence activities, demonstrates the discourses at play in this case of South-South contact. In contrast with the calls for solidarity with North Africa from the renowned Cuban poet and independence movement leader José Martí, de la Concepción makes sense of his Ceutan experience by using the medieval to position himself as a civilized Cuban, superior to both Spaniards and North Africans. Thus, coloniality creates barriers to South-South solidarity.

Dr. Christina Civantos is a Professor of Hispanic and Arabic Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on Arabic-speaking immigrants in Hispano-America and Spain, South-South relations between Latin America and the Arab world, empire and coloniality, nationalisms, memory studies, and tolerance. She is the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity(2006), The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (2017), and Jamón and Halal: Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía (2022), as well as numerous essays.