Silvia Sopale’s work as an actress, writer, and cultural organizer and her presence in the contemporary theater community in Spain has made a major impact in raising to the surface discussions of Blackness and the intersectionality of race and gender in the country’s present. In this conversation with Silvia, Jeffrey Coleman (Northwestern) will think about the relevance of her work as part of a generation of Afro-descendent and afrohispanics writers, creators, and cultural organizers who have been able to create spaces (through their art and their activism) that have shifted the way in which art and culture engage with issues of race as a current and historical problem in Spain that has not (yet) fully entered the academy in Spain.

Silvia Sopale - https://www.kjcc.org/in-residence/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).

Jeffrey K. Coleman - https://spanish-portuguese.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/teaching-research-faculty/coleman-jeffrey.html

Jeffrey K. Coleman is an Associate Professor of Iberian Studies in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Northwestern University. He specializes in Contemporary Iberian Spanish and Catalan theatre & popular culture. His first book, The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage (Northwestern University Press, 2020), explores how the intersections of race and immigration manifest in Spanish theatre from 1991-2016. He is currently working on two book projects. The first, Racial Animation: The Consumption & Rejection of Blackness in Contemporary Spain, which explores the ways in which Spanish media, popular culture, and literature have portrayed and appropriated Blackness from the early 20th century to the present, leading to the creation of a Black Spain. The second is Liquid Identities: Bottling the Nation, which explores wine as an avenue through which to understand the complexities of Spanish history and culture. In addition, He is the co-founder of TRECE (Taller de Raza, Etnicidad y Ciudadanía en España), a research group that actively theorizes and conceptualizes race in contemporary Spain.