About the event
When known or cited, Black women intellectuals are predominantly from the United States, and their works are written exclusively in English. Afro-Costa Rican writer and political activist Eulalia Bernard Little (1935-2022) breaks this pattern. Through her poetry, essays, and affective artifacts, Bernard developed a powerful theory about time and leadership.
Eulalia's words and actions reveal how leaders can hold multiple timeframes at once—honoring ancestral wisdom, responding to present crises, and building toward future liberation. She shows us that social change requires both action and rest, both urgency and patience. Bernard's temporal consciousness disrupts colonial regimes of time and offers new possibilities for radical politics.
By centering a Black Caribbean woman from Central America as a theorist, this talk opens broader questions crucial to Latin American Studies today: How do ideas circulate across the Global South? Who gets called an intellectual, and why? How might Bernard's literary work reshape our approach to decolonial thought and research methodologies?
This seminar invites us to reconsider whose knowledge counts and how we might build more expansive, equitable frameworks for understanding intellectual production in the Americas.
Photo credit for banner image of Eulalia Bernard Little: Diana Senior Angulo via Marianela Muñoz-Muñoz
About the speaker
Marianela Muñoz Muñoz achieved her PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, with Doctoral Portfolios in African and African Diaspora Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is a Professor at the School of Philology, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Costa Rica and a Fulbright-Laspau scholar.
Her research centers on Black women's politics, literature and political thought. Her broader scholarly interests include Latin American literary and cultural studies, race and ethnicity in Latin America, Indigenous and Black epistemologies, and feminist decolonial and Black cultural studies.
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. No registration is required, simply come along on the day.
Are you interested in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies?
Founded in 1919, LLC has one of the best-established departments of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS) in the UK, offering a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including teaching and supervision in Basque, Catalan, Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish studies.
