Herbst 2023 - Frühjahr 2024

The Conundrum of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century Social Scientific Writing from Cuba: The Revista Cubana (1885-94)

During her time as a Visiting Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, María has been researching the Revista Cubana (1885-94), edited by Enrique José Varona (a nearly complete set of the original publication is available in the Iberoamerikanisches Institut). In particular, María is examining how the magazine incrementally develops interconnected arguments against empire and against slavery through experiments with new developments in social science, particularly criminology. María is particularly interested in how contradictions and differences of opinion affect the broader anti-imperial and anti-colonial arguments proposed by the magazine’s editors, and the role that Cuba’s race problems play in this editorial experiment.

María del Pilar Blanco is Professor of Spanish American and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where she is also Fellow in Spanish at Trinity College. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012), co-editor, with Esther Peeren, of Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010) and The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory (2013), and with Joanna Page, of Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (2020). She is completing Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Spanish America, 1870-1920 (under contract with Oxford University Press).