Workshop: “Writing the Many Lives of Juan de Pareja”

David Pullins

University Club, Room 313
@ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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While the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter sought to recover as much empirical evidence as possible about this understudied seventeenth-century artist, this workshop will focus on the vast body of writing about him from the centuries after his death.  Operating with precious few facts, authors felt free to image his life to wildly different ends.  Often engaging stereotypes around enslavement, race and ethnic origin, Pareja’s surprisingly wide-spread presence in nineteenth-century popular culture served both pro- and anti- abolitionist movements.  In the twentieth century United States, these threads were taken up by a key voice on Pareja, the Harlem Renaissance writer Arturo Schomburg, and in the Newbery Award winning children’s book, I, Juan de Pareja, that made his name familiar to a generation of school children in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.