Speakers:
Noémie Ndiaye
Danielle Roper
Respondent: Silvia Albert Sopale (Spring 2025 KJC Chair, NYU)
Moderated by: Jill Lane
In English
Date: April 10, 2025, 7 pm
Location: Hemispheric Institute, 20 Cooper Square

Sponsored by Espacio de Culturas @KJCC
In partnership with the Hemispheric Institute, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Africa and the African Diaspora, CMEP (Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation), the Medieval and Renaissance Center, and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication.

In Spring 2025, Espacio de Culturas @KJCC will be the home to Barcelona-based artist Silvia Albert Sopale, this year’s KJC Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization. As part of her public programs, Espacio de Culturas will co-produce her play Blackface y otras vergüenzas, as part of LaTea @ the Clemente’s eMeLeK festival. Her piece explores the legacies of blackface in contemporary Spain, highlighting the persistence of racial impersonation and its cross-connections with blackface around the globe. This panel positions Sopale's work in conversation with two leading scholars of racial impersonation in the Spanish-speaking world: Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), author of the award-winning book Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Penn UP 2022), and Danielle Roper (University of Chicago), author of the forthcoming Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas (Duke UP 2025). Professors Ndiaye and Roper will explore the racial geographies of blackface practices from early modern Europe to the contemporary Americas. What accounts for the persistence of blackface? How does it participate in ideologies of race-making? How can contemporary scholars and artists work to unmake those practices? The roundtable will be moderated by Jill Lane (NYU).

Noémie Ndiaye [Photo from this website can be used: https://english.uchicago.edu/people/noemie-ndiaye

Noémie Ndiaye is an Associate professor of English Literature with a coterminous appointment in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish theater with a critical focus on race. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Penn Press 2022) and the co-editor, with Lia Markey, of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World (ACMRS Press 2023). She has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass, Thaêtre, and in various edited collections.

Danielle Roper is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work on racial and queer performance, feminist activism, and racial formation in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe. Her first book Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas is forthcoming with Duke University Press (May 2025). Roper is the curator of the visual exhibit Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. She is currently completing her second book Racial Reckoning: Black Performance and Visual Art in the Caribbean and its Diasporas.
Find photograph here: https://rll.uchicago.edu/danielle-roper
Jill Lane https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/jill-meredith-lane.html

Silvia Albert Sopale https://academiadelasartesescenicas.es/silvia-albert-sopale/

Silvia Albert Sopale is the Spring 2025 KJC Chair at Espacio de Culturas @KJCC. She is a Spanish Afrodescendant actress, writer, and cultural organizer. Born in San Sebastián, she currently resides in Barcelona and performs in Spanish and Catalan. She is a member of the Academy of Performing Arts of Spain, the founder and director of Periferia Cimarronas, the first Black theater in Spain, as well as the founder of Hibiscus, the Association of Afro-Spanish and Afrodescendents, and director of the Black Barcelona Festival. She is also the founder of Tinta Negra, a collective advocating for racial diversity in performing arts, and a member of t.i.c.t.a.c. (Workshop for Critical Transfeminist Antiracist Combative Interventions). She is the creator of: No es país para negras (2014), Blackface y otras vergüenzas (2019), Parad de pararme (2021), Cuentos desde la Periferia (2023), Mahmud y no solo Mahmud (2023) and Lotö, Un ritual de emancipación corporal (2024).