Arab Latin America in the Artistic Imagination

Since the early 20th. Century, the arrival of Arab populations in Latin America has had a profound impact on the region's artistic landscape. In music, poems, novels, films, and visual imagery, there has been a long - and complicated - tradition of representation, including works created by and about Arab Latin Americans. This talk will provide an overview of this tradition, highlighting the key themes that run through it and the questions that it raises about the relationship between race, ethnicity, and national identity.

About the Presenter
Professor Tamara Walker is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her scholarly interests encompass three interrelated thematic areas: the history of slavery and freedom in Latin America; the process of racial formation in the region; and the ways in which gender shaped the experience of enslavement and racialization. Her work is also inspired by the methodological concern of recovering the subjectivities of enslaved and free people of African descent who rarely had direct access to writing and whose voices were heavily mediated when they did appear on record.

She is the author of Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge University Press, July 2017) and is currently at work on a new book project that explores the relationship between African slavery and piracy in the Southern Pacific during the era of the Manila Galleon trade.

About the Islam & Latin America Series
This event is co-organized by the Latin American Studies program in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Institute for Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. We are grateful for the support of the Office of the Vice-President, International for the organization of this series, running from 2019 to 2022.