11 Forbes explores different significations of blackness in a variety of European languages in the late medieval and early modern periods.  
physical and epistemic violence of the great Amerindian and African colonial holocausts that included the uprooting of peoples, exploitation of labour and resources, and attempts to eradicate vernacular cultures. We understand these ethnic-racial signifiers as key categories of the modern self and to have been constituted through a dialectical process between two articulated axes. On the one hand, how racial-colonial subjects are labelled or interpellated by hegemonic discourses and, on the other hand, as modes of self-definition based on the enactment of struggles and strategies of community-making by subaltern peoples. Hence, even though the label negro was born out of the stigma of enslavement, dehumanization, denial of being, and attributions of savagery, the signifier negro has also been invested by people of African descent with positive meaning as a form of collective definition of self through their everyday resistances, political and social movements, cultural creations, and intellectual currents. Aimé Césaire contends that the Haitian Revolution was a landmark in the constitution of Negritude as a historical identity linked to a project of decolonization and liberation (Césaire, 2000). Much earlier in modern history, in sixteenth-century Spain, the writings of formerly enslaved African professor and poet Juan Latino demonstrate a historical record of positive significations of negro as a self-descriptor for people of African descent and with dark skin. ${ }^{12}$