The Anticolonial Century at the Panama Canal

Description

In 1885, an explosive civil conflict in Colombia threatened commerce across the Isthmus of Panama, and U.S. Marines deployed to quell the uprising along the interoceanic transit. The end of the conflict included the execution of Pedro Prestán, an Afro-Panamanian lawyer, politician, and Liberal revolutionary, who stood accused of ordering the incineration of the port city of Colón. Prestán's challenge to both Colombian conservatism and U.S. imperialism has been reinterpreted across 20th-century literature in and beyond Panama.

This talk explores Prestán's own writings as well as the work of two scholar-authors: the Afro-Guyanese modernist Eric Walrond and the Panamanian historian and comic book artists Rómulo Bethancourt Arosemena and Ologuagdi. In a decolonizing world, Black and Indigenous writers from Latin America and the Caribbean reappraised the mechanisms shaping the historical memory of popular anti-imperialists like Prestán.

This event is a public talk and workshop from Harris Feinsod and Bécquer Seguín's seminar Anticolonial Thought. It is hosted by the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.