Episode 57 with Michael Ugarte and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

In this second part of our two-part series on Equatorial Guinea, we’re joined by Michael Ugarte and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya to take a look at the literature of this West African nation, considering everything from European travel writers to European settlers, authors from Equatorial Guinea, and women writers. We pay special attention to the subject of exilic writing and highlight a few of the country’s most well-known authors along the way, including Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and María Nsué Angüe.

The Episode

The Guests

Michael Ugarte is professor emeritus of Spanish literature at the University of Missouri. He has written four books of literary-cultural criticism on aspects of modern Spanish literature, mostly 20^th century, including Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain, translated into Spanish by Mónica Marcos-Llinas. He has also written many articles and book chapters, as well as three pieces published in The Nation. In retirement he has written a memoir of his mother, Mercedes Light and Dark.

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya is professor of Spanish colonial studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra University. Her research engages with Spanish colonial pasts and presents, archives, and legacies, both in north and sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is invested in the study of colonial links within and beyond the frame of the multiple Spanish imperial Atlantic and global networks, and she has published extensively on the politics and processes of decolonization, colonial health and biopolitics, colonial domestic labor, colonial carceral systems, the colonial politics of meteorology, colonial archives, and on the intersections of gender, science and colonialism.

Suggested Readings

• Ávila Laurel, Juan Tomás. By Night the Mountain Burns. Translated by Jethro Soutar. Sheffield: And Other Stories Press, 2014.
• Ávila Laurel, Juan Tomás. The Gurugu Pledge. Translated by Jethro Soutar. Sheffield: And Other Stories Press, 2017.
• Bolekia Boleká, Justo. Löbëla. Translated by Michael Ugarte. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2015.
• Fra Molinero, Baltasar and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya. “Theorizing Equatorial Guinea.” Special monographic issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009): 478 pages.
• Lewis, Marvin. Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017.
• Ndongo Bidyogo, Donato. Shadows of your Black Memory. Translated by Michael Ugarte. Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2007.
• Ngom, Mbare. “Writing from Exile: Memories, Displacement, and the Construction of National Identity in the Poetic Production of Equatorial Guinea.” Afro Hispanic Review 28, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 97-112.
• Obono, Trifonia Melibea. La bastarda. Translated by Lawrence Schimel. New York: The Feminist Press, 2018.
• Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Rethinking the archive and the colonial library: Equatorial Guinea.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (Nov. 2008): 341-63.
• Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Ekomo’s Interventions.” In African Immigrants and Contemporary Spanish Texts. Crossing the Straits. Edited by Debra Faszer-McMahon and Victoria Ketz. New York: Routledge, 2015: 177-192.
• Ugarte, Michael. Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.