Anne Kraume (Constance): “‘Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me hicieron atravesar.’ Transoceanic Memory in 20th-Century Afro-Latin American Poetry” | Transoceanic Exchanges

Tuesday, 27 January 2026, 2pm-4pm CET
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, room HZ 8

Co-organised by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Prof. Dr. Barbara Alge, funded by ZIAF.

The lecture series is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.

Anne Kraume (University of Constance, Germany)

In my talk, I will explore how 20th-century Afro-Latin American women poets engage with the ocean as a site of historical trauma, diasporic memory, and cultural transformation. Taking Nancy Morejón’s line “Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me hicieron atravesar” as a point of departure, I will exam- ine how women poets such as Morejón (Cuba), Mayra Santos-Febres (Puerto Rico), Mary Grueso Romero (Colombia), Shirley Campbell Barr (Costa Rica), Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Repub- lic), and others invoke transoceanic imaginaries to reclaim histories of displacement and forge counter- narratives to colonial erasure. Their poetic texts articulate the sea not merely as a geographic or sym- bolic space, but as a lived archive of Black experience, where memory becomes sensory, embodied, and politically resonant.

By weaving together personal, collective, and ancestral voices, these poets develop a poetics of rupture and resistance that challenges fixed notions of identity, belonging, and temporality. Through close readings and contextualizations, the lecture will situate their works within the framework of the oceanic turn, drawing on insights from postcolonial ecocriticism, diaspora stud- ies, and Black Atlantic theory.

Bio Note:

Anne Kraume is Professor of Romance Literatures with a focus on Latin American literature at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests include the literatures of the Spanish-American Enlightenment and independence, cultures of memory in Latin America and Europe, questions of genre poetics in trans- and intercultural contexts, and transoceanic imaginaries, particularly in Latin American literature. His most recent publications include the monograph Literatur und Unabhängigkeit. Transatlantische Verflechtungen bei fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1763-1827) (2023) as well as various essays on contemporary Latin American and French-language literatures.