Florida State University’s Afro-Latinx Prize Went to a Non-Afro-Latino Scholar and It Raises a Question About How Far Cultural Appreciation Can Go

Academic prizes exist to signal what a field values, who it trusts and whose work it believes deserves to represent a given subject to the world. At the 114th annual conference of the College Art Association this past February, Associate Professor Paul Niell, who teaches at Florida State University, received the 2026 ALAA/LASA-VCS Afro-Latin American/Afro-Latinx Scholarship Prize for his essay about an enslaved woman named Juana Agripina in 19th century Ponce, Puerto Rico. The research is being praised by colleagues as a future classic of the field. Niell is not Afro-Latino, and that detail is worth sitting with for a moment before moving on to the accolades.

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The prize has a clear cultural mandate, one that implies a commitment to centering scholarship that speaks to a community whose artistic and historical contributions have spent centuries being ignored or absorbed by people with no personal stake in getting the story right. So when an award named after that community goes to a scholar outside it, the question that deserves to be asked openly is whether appreciation and authority are the same thing, and whether the institutions making these decisions have thought carefully enough about the difference.

The Research Itself Is Not the Problem

Niell’s essay, published in “Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions,” edited by Nathaniel Robert Walker and Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, reconstructs the life of Juana Agripina, an enslaved woman who passed through the hands of several enslavers and abusers across multiple houses, landscapes and public spaces in Ponce. The editors describe the work as using archival and architectural documentation to restore visibility to African-descendant people whose experiences have been systematically erased from the plazas, monuments and museums of a city with a rich built heritage and a profound debt to the enslaved.

Scholar Erika Loic described the essay’s impact in terms that are difficult to dismiss. She wrote that months after reading it, she still recalled Juana Agripina’s 24-mile journey to Ponce, at the end of which the enslaved woman placed her 14-pound iron chain before the city council, and that Niell’s archival work exposed the twisted logic of an abuser who argued that if her constitution was strong enough to walk that distance under the chain’s weight, it called the severity of her abuse into question. Scholar Stephanie Leitch compared the essay to Byron Hamann’s landmark 2010 piece in the Art Bulletin, calling it destined to become a classic of the field.

The research sounds extraordinary. That is genuinely not the issue.

The Question Nobody at the Conference Seemed to Ask

The ALAA/LASA-VCS prize was established in 2022 to recognize distinguished scholarly work on Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American art and visual culture. Its previous recipients have included Tatiana Flores, Matthew Rarey, Abigail Lapin-Dardashti and Miguel Valerio. The award has a name that implies a promise to a specific community, and the College Art Association’s decision to give it to a non-Afro-Latino scholar invites a conversation that polite academic circles tend to sidestep.

Does it matter who is doing the research? And does it matter even more when the institution giving the award has named that award after the very community whose representation is at stake?

These are the kinds of questions that make people uncomfortable in academic settings, where the quality of research is supposed to be the only variable that counts. But cultural communities across Latin America and the diaspora have been pushing back on that assumption for years. The argument is not that outsiders produce bad work. Sometimes they produce work that is meticulous and moving and genuinely useful to the communities they study. The argument is about who gets to be the authority, who collects the prizes, and whose name ends up on the award that was created to honor a specific group’s legacy.

What Authenticity Actually Means

Consider a more everyday version of this tension. As a Colombian woman, I recently came across a food influencer describing an “authentic” Colombian restaurant she had discovered in Miami, and the first question that came to mind was not about the menu. It was about whether she was Colombian herself, because that answer would determine everything about what her version of “authentic” actually meant and whose palate, memory and cultural knowledge was being used to make that determination. If she were not Colombian, her enthusiasm for the food would be genuine and welcome, but her authority to define what makes it authentic would be a considerably harder case to make.

That is not a hostile question. It is an honest one. A non-Colombian food critic can appreciate Colombian cuisine, write about it with genuine enthusiasm and still not be the person best positioned to define what is authentic about it, because authenticity in that context is not about technique or ingredients alone. It is about the accumulated experience of growing up inside something, of understanding its contradictions and its specific emotional register in ways that no amount of research fully replicates.

The same logic applies to scholarship. A non-Afro-Latino researcher can spend years in the archives, treat their subject with enormous respect and produce work that Afro-Latino communities find valuable and accurate. It is still reasonable to ask whether an award named after those communities should go to someone outside them, and whether doing so sends a message about whose expertise the institution trusts most to represent that experience to the world.

Does Florida State University Need a Refresher on Appreciation Versus Authority?

The deeper issue is one that societies are genuinely struggling to resolve, and academia is not exempt from it. There is a meaningful difference between appreciating a culture and claiming authority over it, and that difference tends to get blurry in spaces where credentials and publication records are the primary currencies of legitimacy.

Cultural appreciation, at its best, produces work that opens doors for the communities being studied, creates resources they can use and makes space for their own scholars and artists and storytellers to be heard. Cultural authority, by contrast, is what happens when the outsider’s version of the story becomes the definitive one, when the prize named after your community goes to someone who studied you rather than someone who lived it, and when the institutions making those decisions have not stopped to ask whether there is a distinction worth preserving.

None of this means Niell’s essay should not exist or that it does not deserve recognition. It means that a prize with Afro-Latinx in its name is making an implicit promise to a community, and that the College Art Association might benefit from asking itself, in a serious and ongoing way, whether the scholars it rewards are the ones best positioned to fulfill that promise or the ones best positioned to explain it to everyone else.