CERVANTINE BLACKNESS with Nicholas Jones and Victor Sierra Matute
During the politically intense days of the Summer of 2020, a group of people protesting the killing of George Floyd tagged with graffiti a monument to Miguel de Cervantes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event produced an enormous outrage in the international media and diplomatic circles. Nicholas R. Jones, a critic and professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, raised a fundamental question about this debate: Do black lives matter less than a monument to the beloved author of Don Quixote? Great questions produce great answers, so, armed with a formidable encyclopedia of critical tools from literary, race, social justice and cultural theory, professor Jones wrote a brilliant meditation –and 3 more—wondering about the subjects of monumentality, the problem of limiting literary studies to the search of agency, the idea of literary criticism as a form of extraction, and much more. The result of this meditative, intensely literary work is Cervantine Blackness, a brilliant book that renews how we can think about literary production in the convoluted multi-everything world of the early modern moment of the Spanish Empire.
Nicholas R. Jones is a Tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. His Cervantine Blackness was published in 2024 by Penn State University Press.
Víctor Sierra Matute, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at CUNY’s Baruch College, author of the forthcoming A Sense of Empire: Perceptual and Material Foundations of Early Modern Iberian Colonialism.
Thursday, November 6, 2025 • 2:40-4:05 p.m. East Library Wing 246, Joan and Donald E. A xinn Librar y, South Campus
Admission is FREE and open to the public. To RSVP visit events.hofstra.edu For more information, please call the Hofstra Cultural Center at 516-463-5669.
