Decolonizing Diasporas: Writing with Afro-Atlantic Archives with Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez

Date
Fri February 3rd 2023, 1:00 - 2:00pm
Event Sponsor
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Stanford Humanities Center
Location
Building 260, Pigott Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
German Library, Room 252

Concerning Violence will host our first workshop of the quarter on Friday, February 3rd, from 1 - 2 PM at the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Building 260, Room 252.

Please join us for a workshop with Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020), winner of the 2021 MLA Prize in Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Studies. In this workshop, Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez will discuss the scaffolding and writing of Decolonizing Diasporas, approaches to literary and intimate archives, and the process of shifting the dissertation project into a viable book manuscript. We will also briefly discuss how to map and develop new projects as your research expands to new areas of interest. Attendees are welcome to bring questions about the content, theory, or writing of the book.

 

Lunch will be provided for all in-person attendees. Please RSVP here.

 

About the book:

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.

Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.

This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

You can learn more about Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez’s work here.

Questions? Email JJ Lugardo jjlugar [at] stanford.edu (jjlugar[at]stanford[dot]edu) and Carmen Ervin carmen.ervin [at] stanford.edu (carmen[dot]ervin[at]stanford[dot]edu)