In January 2025, the WHC welcomed Monica Styles, assistant professor of Spanish at Howard University, as its inaugural HBCU Faculty Fellow. Her research examines representations of Africans and people of African descent in Caribbean and Latin American literature from the early modern to modern periods.
During her fellowship, Professor Styles advanced two book projects that contribute to the growing body of scholarship addressing critical blind spots related to Black agency in colonial Latin American literary studies. The first project, “Recuperating Black Perspectives from the Early Modern Caribbean” (under contract with Vanderbilt University Press), develops the concept of Afro-intertextuality to trace how Black voices—often embedded within texts written by European-descended authors—collectively shaped colonial literary cultures in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean. Grounded in critical Black theory and Black feminist theory, this work reads fragments of Black voices and the presence of Black bodies as a collective whose agency disrupts dominant Eurocentric narratives, establishing a longer genealogy of a Black literary tradition in the colonial literary canon.
Her second book project, “Afro-Peruvians in the Colonial Latin American Library Canon,” focuses on seventeenth-century writings about and by Afro-Peruvian healers. Drawing from Inquisitorial trials against Afro-Peruvian women accused of witchcraft and biographical writings about prominent Afro-Peruvian healers, the project explores how these narratives engaged with, shaped, and at times subverted prevailing colonial ideologies surrounding race and gender.
As part of her residency, Professor Styles shared research from her first book project during a lunchtime discussion cosponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Speaking to a cross-disciplinary audience of students and faculty, she introduced the book’s theoretical framework and offered a close reading of Bartolomé de las Casas’s History of the Indies. She argued that narratives about Afro-descendants in texts by European-descended authors, beginning with accounts of Black maroon resistance, reveal a subconscious yet foundational Black intellectual legacy that transcends colonial/postcolonial and regional divides.