• Collage of images of black Americans protesting and people shown as divine figures.
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Dante’s Commedia Champions for All Humanity - Black Lives Matter, 2021.

My timeline’s main theme is the African American perception and representation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. After the lecture where we viewed a video together on the pioneering movement of the Comedy in African American Studies, I felt that it was necessary to use the Commedia to tie the past’s themes and motifs to what black folks globally have felt this past year, specifically in the United States with the Black Lives Matter protests and the deaths of so many innocent lives at the hands of police brutality. I want to show how African Americans champion the same ideals of anti-enslavement, anti-corruption, and self-introspection towards salvation that is present in Dante’s work. We are impacted by the past in how those same values ought to be uplifted across all humanity, no matter the race, skin color, gender, sexuality, religion, and more. Ultimately, I interpreted Dante’s work similarly to that of African Americans historically, in the journey towards enlightenment and condemning those corrupted by power, greed, and wealth.

Silvia Nolasco
B.A. Comparative Literature, History, 2021 | UC Berkeley Literature Visual Arts |
Silvia's art collage brought together intersectional themes of African American studies and reception of Dante's Commedia to the contemporary era of protests and activism in the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Silvia does not claim to have taken the photos used in the project, she does believe in the empowerment of black voices in all spaces, including that of literary study and critical reading spaces.