November 14, 2018 Noon in COBA 239
BIO
Dr. Sonja Watson is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her areas of specialty are Afro-Panamanian and Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Culture, Hip Hop, and Critical Race Theory. Dr. Watson has published articles in the College Language Association Journal, the Afro-Hispanic Review, the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Journal, the Cincinnati Romance Review, El Istmo, Callaloo, PALARA, Hispania, alternativas, and LiminaR about black identity in the Hispanic Caribbean. She is the author of The Politics of Race in Panama: Afro-Hispanic and West Indian Literary Discourses of Contention (University Press of Florida, 2014, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2017 NEH-HSI Faculty award. She is also co-editor along with Dr. Dorothy Mosby of the journal PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association.
ABSTRACT
Research on Panama has primarily focused on the Canal and the United States’ relationship to the construction of the “eighth wonder of the modern world.” The Canal brought to Panama not only international recognition but also thousands of black English-speaking laborers from Jamaica and Barbados. West Indian workers labored on the Canal, made Panama their permanent home, and in turn transformed the ethnic, racial, and linguistic composition of the nation. A century later, black West Indian descendants in Panama continue to shape and influence the nation linguistically, culturally, and racially despite negligible recognition from the Panamanian nation-state. ‘Globalization, Transculturation, and Hybrid Identity in Panamanian reggae en español inserts black West Indian heritage into the Panamanian nation-state by analyzing the emergence and continuing influence of a black musical genre (reggae en español) as emblematic of national identity in Panama. Specifically, it interrogates Panamanian reggae en español artists’ engagement with the Panamanian nation-state and their articulation of national and black identity in a nation with a long history of exclusion of African descendants. My previous work, The Politics of Race in Panama: Afro-Hispanic and West Indian Literary Discourses of Contention (University Press of Florida, 2014), captured the cultural politics of race from an historical and literary perspective. This work builds on this previous research by analyzing a marginalized cultural musical art form to bring clarity to urban narratives of poverty, economic disenfranchisement, and racial discrimination across the African diaspora.