The papers in this panel explore the practices and meanings of literacy among African-descended peoples, both enslaved and free, in Latin America. Straddling both the colonial and national periods, the panel provides a platform for Latin Americanists to discuss the role of black literacy in the context of struggles for slave emancipation, wars of independence from Spain and Portugal, and the political ferment of the abolition era. Covering Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, speakers will think collectively about literacy as more than a set of skills such as reading or writing. Case studies suggest that literacy can be both a social practice responding to specific cultural needs and a window into the interpretive and political activities of Afro-descendants. This panel challenges the invisibility of black intellectual practices in Latin American history by approaching them as users and producers of written culture.

Black literacy has left its diffuse imprint in the archives but remains underexplored in Latin American studies. The assumption that enslavement and low levels of alphabetic literacy prevented Afro-descendants from fully participating in public life is so strong that their literacy practices have remained hidden from view. During the Age of Revolutions, the interplay between the oral and the written was crucial to forming black identities in the Americas. Written culture did not exist at the expense of orality; quite the contrary, it traveled through speech to reach listening audiences, often many times removed from the original ideas on paper. Thus, black literacy often required access to literate mediators, oral dictation, communal reading, and materials in print. Ordinary people who were semi-literate, partially educated, or even illiterate could be skilled litigants who enlisted the assistance of curators, notaries, lawyers, and diplomats to challenge the status quo in writing.

The presentations will discuss the intersection of literacy and black struggles for autonomy in colonial and national contexts. Evelyne Laurent-Perrault examines a slave conspiracy in eighteenth-century Venezuela and the practice of letter-writing among enslaved rebels. Javier R. Ardila explores the relationship between enslaved litigants and written culture in the courts of Ecuador during the Age of Revolutions. Óscar Yesid Zabala Sandoval analyzes the career of the Afro-Colombian politician and writer Juan José Nieto, emphasizing his views on the abolition of slavery in Colombia. Finally, Isadora Mota focuses on the meanings of black literacy in nineteenth-century Brazil by analyzing letters and petitions handwritten by enslaved men and women.

This panel seeks to map the multiple literacy practices of Africans and Afro-descendants in Latin America. It sheds light on non-traditional paths to literacy, and that reading and writing were not always linked to black social and economic mobility but rather to advancing different forms of political belonging and communal aspirations. As such, the papers should appeal to historians of slavery in the Americas, print culture, and the African diaspora. Ultimately, the panel is an invitation to explore black intellectual history in Latin America and to reflect on the participation of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic public sphere.