Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: Odette Casamayor-Cisneros - Worldmaking Otherwise: Black Women's Epistemological Marronage in Latin America and the Caribbean

Date
Thu May 14th 2026, 3:00 - 4:30pm
Event Sponsor
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Location
Building 260, Pigott Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm 252

Please join us for the upcoming Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone talk with Odette Casamayor-Cisneros (University of Pennsylvania). 

Abstract:
 
What does it mean to exist and produce knowledge from what Sylvia Wynter terms the “demonic ground”—the constitutive outside of Western humanism? I argue that Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women transform this position of structural exclusion into a generative site of knowledge production, forging modes of knowing that fracture inherited grammars of race, gender, and the human while opening new possibilities for collective life.
 
Bridging literary studies, visual art, performance, and Afro-diasporic philosophy, I propose epistemological marronage as a critical, interdisciplinary framework for understanding contemporary Black cultural production. I conceptualize epistemological marronage as a radical disengagement from systems of thought structured by coloniality and Eurocentric imaginaries—what I term the epistemological plantation. In tandem, I introduce paraontological self-birth to describe the processes through which Black women refuse imposed identities and invent themselves otherwise, beyond the limits of the human as currently defined. Drawing on Wynter’s theorization of the demonic ground and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of blacklight, I show how archival absence, ancestral memory, and enfleshed experience converge to contest epistemic authority and reconfigure the conditions of intelligibility. In doing so, these practices articulate new configurations of the human that are diasporic, relational, and open-ended.
 
At a moment when extractive capitalism, colonial afterlives, and the weaponization of knowledge aggressively coalesce to foreclose livable futures, these practices emerge as vital intellectual resources, inviting us to rethink the boundaries of the human and to imagine, with renewed urgency, more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting the world.
 
Speaker bio:
 
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work brings cultural analysis into dialogue with Black feminist thought, critical race theory, and the literary, visual, and performance arts. A Cuban-born scholar, writer, and art critic, she examines Afro-diasporic epistemologies and cultural practices across Latin America and the Caribbean, foregrounding lived experience, embodied memory, and creative expression as vital modes of theorization. Her transdisciplinary approach advances hemispheric understandings of Black cultural production and political imagination.
 
She is the author of Utopía, distopía e ingravidez, a study of post-Soviet Cuban literature, and Una casa en los Catskills, a short story collection exploring displacement, intimacy, and belonging. Her forthcoming experimental memoir, In Black Ink: Writings from the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman, offers an intimate meditation on Black womanhood and diasporic identity. Her work has received recognition, including awards from Radio France Internationale and the Cuban Writers and Artists Union, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, the Collegium Helveticum, and Harvard University.
 
Event Link