Juan Suárez Ontaneda, assistant professor of Spanish, has received a Wolf Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship.
Suárez Ontaneda's research analyzes how Latin American states produce discourses about race, and how people respond to those discourses both individually and collectively. His current book manuscript, Palimpsests of Blackness in Latin America: The Performative Lives of Nascimento, Zapata Olivella, and Santa Cruz, examines how Afro-Latin American artists from Brazil, Colombia, and Peru used staged representations (writings, theater, sound recordings, choreographies, film) to challenge racism and discrimination in their respective countries from 1940-2000. By analyzing their staged representations, Suárez Ontaneda shows how these artists used their bodies to communicate messages of racial activism and, by doing so, how they created a vocabulary to protest racial injustices beyond the legal framework of the state.