The project “Filling the Silence Before Rescue: Editorial Trajectories of Afrodescendant Writers in 20th-Century Colombia” examines the cultural infrastructure within which Afro-Colombian authors Arnoldo Palacios Mosquera, Rogelio Velásquez Murillo, Carlos Arturo Truque, and Gregorio Sánchez Gómez produced their literary and non-fiction works between 1940 and 1960. Literature written by Black authors in Colombia has long been marginal. As Prescott (1996) noted, “[no] major efforts have been made by either governmental or private entities to promote and publicize not only the existence of a significant African element in the country, but also its cultural legacy” (p. 109). What remains understudied is the infrastructure of that limited space. Beyond exposing its epistemic violence, I argue for the importance of centering that margin and reconstructing the dynamics that enabled texts to circulate within it. My goal is to build an analytical framework that allows for an Afro-centered history of the book. With book and reading history at the core of my project, I propose a double journey: outward, to trace the publishing histories of these four writers from Chocó; and inward, to analyze how books and readers themselves appear as literary tropes in these and other texts by midtwentieth-century Black Colombian authors.

Over the past year, I have worked extensively with key primary sources. Because my project seeks both to examine the material dimensions of books and to read them closely for moments when literacy, reading, and writing are thematized, access to primary sources has been crucial. I have consulted editions published from the 1950s onward and conducted press searches to understand how these authors appeared—or failed to appear—in print culture.

This work has led me to design an analytical framework for the editorial trajectories of Afro-Latin American writers, one that highlights how they sought to write, publish, and circulate their ideas. The evidence so far has led me to conceptualize the gestas (feats) and gestos (gestures) of Afro-Colombian writers. By gestas, I mean the major achievements and struggles that made writing possible, and by gestos the smaller, subtle strategies that brought a book into being. Both were enacted within a broader cultural infrastructure. Reconstructing that infrastructure, especially in the case of racialized authors, requires attention to the objects, networks, and decisions that enabled their texts to exist. In this way, my project contributes to a more nuanced historicization of what Caicedo Ortiz has called “the written tradition of Afro-Colombian thought” or its “printed memory”—the discourses and texts Black intellectuals have developed to think, imagine, and name their futures since their own, or their ancestors’, arrival in the Americas (2013, pp. 31–34).

A particularly significant finding is the inclusion of María Teresa Martínez de Varela, a writer from Chocó whose first novel, Guerra y amor (1947), fits seamlessly into the corpus. Including her broadens the scope of my project and allows me to examine gender more closely, raising the question of what it meant to publish as an Afro-Colombian woman in the 1950s. Another discovery has been the need to study the ways these writers connected through clubs, associations, and congresses, where they debated Afro-Colombian identity, reflected on the obstacles facing Black intellectual production, and organized artistic and political activities. To pursue this line of inquiry further, I plan a short research trip to California to consult records of congresses and clubs in which these writers participated on the Pacific coast.

Between 2024–2025, I have produced three initial research outputs, all made possible by the fellowship. First, I assisted in the workshop “Digital Humanities Projects in Afro-Latin American Literatures”, held virtually in November 2024 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and led by Professor Eduard Arriaga, where I received valuable feedback on my proposal to translate my findings into a digital humanities project. Second, I submitted an article titled “Gestas y gestos: escrituras y edición de autores afrocolombianos a mediados del siglo XX” to the peer-reviewed journal Estudios de Literatura Colombiana; it has been under review since August 2025. Third, I will present at two international conferences in Bogotá in September and October 2025: the seventh Congreso de Historia Intelectual de Latinoamérica (CHIAL)* and the symposium “Textual Politics in a Feminist Key: Literary Histories, Re-editions, Anthologies, Dictionaries, Periodicals.”** I am deeply grateful to SHARP for supporting my project and for the ongoing inspiration I draw from its members.

• See page 17 of the conference program, https://urosario.edu.co/sites/default/files/2025-09/eventovii-congreso-de-historia-intelectual-de-america-latina-chial.pdf

** Conference program, https://facartes.uniandes.edu.co/literatura/simposio-2025-politicastextuales-en-clave-feminista/#1755030216372-0594a931-1908