3 The imputations of blood impurity against Jews and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula during late medieval times have been interpreted in numerous ways. See, in particular, Martínez (2008).
4 For a particularly deep analysis of the world-historical significance of 1492, see Dussel (1992). A more celebrated analysis of 1492 as a pillar of the modern self is that of Todorov (1999). See Coronil's critique (1997) of Todorov's occidentalist logic.  
Thus, genealogies of significations of 'Africanity' and 'blackness' in countries which were former colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and which form the region we now know as Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, should begin by addressing late medieval to early modern racial discourses in the Iberian Peninsula. ${ }^{5}$ This entails analysing how racial discourses and categories were exported, modified, and reshaped through the processes of conquest, colonization, and enslavement of the Atlantic world as the main locus of capitalist modernity beginning in the long sixteenth century. Statebuilding came along with empire-building; for this reason, the conquest and colonization of the vast territory that came to be known as the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery, whereby millions of sub-Saharan Africans were enslaved, framed the historical conditions for the establishment of modern racial discourses. ${ }^{6}$