Matthew Pettway

Matthew Pettway is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of South Alabama where he is associated with the Africana Studies Program. He teaches Afro-Latin American, Caribbean and Spanish literatures. He was a Visiting Scholar in the LLILAS BENSON Latin American Studies Collections at the University of Texas in Austin in 2014. And, in 2013, the University of Kansas named him the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor. At Kansas, he offered a graduate seminar on blacks in Cuban literature and delivered a public lecture on his research. Moreover, he was conferred the Foreign Language Area Studies Award (FLAS) to study Brazilian Portuguese in Salvador da Bahia in summer 2005.

Pettway has a keen interest in how Afro-Latin Americans that endured extreme trauma in the colonial era took hold of the aesthetic and spiritual tools available to them to conceive a poetics of emancipation. His research examines race, slavery, and African ideas of spirit and cosmos in nineteenth-century Black Cuban literature. His work is part of a broader project of literary and historical recovery, akin to what Toni Morrison has termed “a kind of literary archaeology.” And, he has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries on Cuban writers of African descent such as Juan Francisco Manzano, Plácido, José del Carmen Díaz, and Ambrosio Echemendía.

His first book, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro-Latino Religion is part of the Caribbean Studies Series of the University Press of Mississippi.

Matthew Pettway is a native of Detroit, Michigan.