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Eyda M. Merediz

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Associate Director for Graduate Academic Affairs and Strategic Initiatives, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center

(301) 405-6451

2215H Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise

Early Modern Studies
Latin America
Transatlantic Studies

Curriculum Vitae

Eyda M. Merediz arrived at the University of Maryland after finishing her doctoral degree at Princeton University and teaching at Union and Smith Colleges. Her academic interests concentrate primarily on the fields of Colonial Latin American Studies and Early Modern Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures.  In addition to several articles and a critical edition, she has published a monograph, Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens (MRTS 2004) that uses the important colonial outpost of the Canary Islands to explore the fluidity of literary and cultural exchanges that prevailed in the Hispanic World of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has also edited, with Santa Arias, the volume Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (MLA 2008). She has also taught and researched on more contemporary Caribbean Studies, in specific Cuban cinema and literature and its trans-national dimension as shown in her edited volume, with Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Otros estudios transatlánticos: lecturas desde lo latinoamericano (IILI, 2009). More recently, she has undertaken a project centered on the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas and the appropriation of his legacy in the Caribbean. Merediz has served as Department Head (2015-2021), SPAP Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Honors Program, as well as the Undergraduate Advisor for the Certificate on Latin American Studies. She has enriched curricular offerings at all levels in her areas of specialization, especially designing  courses on Latin American Popular Culture mixing visual (Telenovelas) and literary materials. For the Office of International Programs,  Merediz have designed several Study Abroad programs and courses for the winter term in Cuba (2002-03), Seville-Spain (2005-present), and Quito/Cuenca-Ecuador (2009-present), for the summer in Salamanca/Barcelona-Spain (2002-present), and also for the semester program in Seville-Spain (2012-present).

Publications

The Caribbean conundrum. José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic

This essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures | College of Arts and Humanities

Author/Lead: Eyda M. Merediz
Dates:

This essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade. Saco adheres to a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates a multiple and contradictory identification with coloniality, that allows him to anchor, his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the Hispanic and Black Atlantic. In turn, Saco and the Lascasian legacy that he rescued becomes an important colonial departure for contemporary theorizations: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Caribbean readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island, as well as Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation with repercussions beyond the Caribbean.

Geografía vs. Geopolítica: las Islas Canarias, América, África

The proximity of the Canary Islands to Africa determined in many ways how identity politics in the early modern period played out in a historiography that had to joggle geography, geopolitics and coloniality.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Author/Lead: Eyda M. Merediz
Dates:
El ilustrado historiador canario José de Viera y Clavijo se queja en el siglo XVIII de que las Islas Canarias hayan sido identificadas mayormente con América y hace un llamado a resituarlas, como corresponde a su proximidad, en África. En efecto, una serie de trabajos historiográficos, literarios y cartográficos de la temprana modernidad, al igual que un gran número de evaluaciones críticas más contemporáneas han enfatizado el papel histórico de Canarias en la carrera de Indias que las han dejado por lo tanto de espaldas a África. Este trabajo propone hacer un rastreo de este juego de localizaciones coloniales que responde a estrategias geopolíticas imperiales; estas evitan la identificación con el África musulmana o el África negra para por último reclamar que Las Canarias sí son África, siempre y cuando África sea la mítica Atlantis. Por ultimo, se explorará lo que estas construcciones literarias significan para el campo de los llamados estudios transatlánticos.

Estudios coloniales latinoamericanos en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios. Ed. Stephanie Kirk. Pittsburgh: IILI.

Malinches canarias: hacia un mestizaje light

This article reviews historical and literary narratives about mestizaje in the Canary Islands in the early modern period.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Author/Lead: Eyda M. Merediz
Dates: -
La alianza política y el romance entre Malinche y Cortés es un caso paradigmático que funciona como dispositivo de un mestizaje fundacional y tenso de marcada relevancia en la historia cultural y literaria de México. En este trabajo quiero retomar otras parejas emblemáticas del otro lado del Atlántico, Tenesoya y Maciot y la princesa Dacil y el Capitán Castillo, que tanto en la crónica, como en la poesía épica y el teatro se han construido de manera similar para sellar el destino político y la condición colonial de Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, Tenerife y las Islas Canarias en general. Al revisar las fuentes históricas y las tempranas apropiaciones literarias que se hacen eco de estos encuentros entre conquistadores y conquistados, buscamos desentrañar una penetrante ideología imperial que busca desasimilarse de la conquista americana, desligarse de la perturbadora África, mirarse étnica y políticamente en el espejo de Europa y enmascarar su colonialidad.

Modernidad, colonialidad y escritura en América Latina. Ed. María Jesús Benítez. Comp. Valeria Añón y Loreley El Jaber. Tucumán, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (EDUNT).

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