Centring Blackness: towards a new public history of the Spanish empire

History 'is, at last, impossible'.1 No single narrative, study, research, or reconstruction of events can capture the complexity of human existence. No single narrative can tell us the story of everything and everyone that has ever existed. Nor it can describe with a genuine level of honesty the emotional universe of individuals that once were. History is the discipline of approximation, a partial description, a bounded analysis of the past.2 When individuals build histories, they tell us a lot about themselves, their values, and their aspirations. Creating a specific type of history is a political choice. Historiographies are political vehicles. As David Harlan put it 'a sense of the past is a way of being in the present. At its best it is a way of arguing with ourselves'.

If impossible, what is the goal of history? Or to be more precise, what is the role of public historians in creating new histories of Europe? Olivette Otelle told us in her powerful recent book, African Europeans, that learning the history of Afro-descendants in Europe has the transformative capacity of dismantling ‘racial oppression in the present’.4 History then is a transformative tool, a vehicle for thinking about the past to change the present. More recently, the historiography of the Global South has demonstrated a growing concern with the histories of those who have been silenced, ignored, or disregarded in terms of the grand narratives.5 Creating the histories ‘of the nobodies’, as Eduardo Galiano called them, allows us to build more accurate, more inclusive, more exciting and complex, democratic, and better descriptions of the past. It is an extraordinary task, but it is also, as Josep Fradera asserted, an important responsibility – ‘the responsibility of explaining (to our compatriots) what they may not want to know’.6

Centring Blackness in European history means inserting the social, intellectual, political, and cultural contribution of Black people in our analysis of the past, going beyond merely acknowledging their presence, and engaging with their individual and collective stories. In this short essay, I will reflect on how these ideas have impacted my work and how telling the history of Spanish anti-slavery activists and of Black soldiers in colonial Cuba allows us to build a better and more exciting European history.