San Martin Center 200A

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies presents

Dennis Hogan (History & Literature, Harvard University) for his talk on the anticolonial century at the Panama Canal: Pedro Prestán, Eric Walrond and the Black Historical Tradition.

In 1885, an explosive civil conflict in Colombia threatened commerce across the Isthmus of Panama, and US 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 US imperialism has been reinterpreted across twentieth-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.

A public talk and workshop in Harris Feinsod and Becquer Seguín’s seminar “Anticolonial Thought.” For more information contact Harris Feinsod.