Matthew Pettway

Dr. Matthew Pettway is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Alabama, where he teaches Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Spanish literatures, and is associated with the Africana Studies Program. A native of Detroit, MI, Dr. Pettway holds a PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies and an MA in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from Michigan State University. His research examines race, slavery, and African ideas of spirit and cosmos in nineteenth-century black Cuban literature. Dr. Pettway has a keen interest in how Afro-Latin Americans who 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 is part of a broader project of literary and historical recovery, akin to what Toni Morrison has termed “a kind of literary archaeology.” Dr. Pettway’s work has appeared in American Studies Journal, PALARA, The Zora Neale Hurston Forum, The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Cuban journal Del Caribe, and his article “The Altar, The Oath and the Body of Christ: Ritual Poetics and Cuban Racial Politics of 1844” is the inaugural chapter in Black Writing, Culture and the State in Latin America, edited by Jerome Branche (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015). Dr. Pettway’s first book, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro-Latino Religion (2019), is part of the Caribbean Studies Series of the University Press of Mississippi.