Virtual: Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez ‘Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature’

The Stone Center’s 2021 Writer’s Discussion Series on March 23 at 3:30 p.m. will host Yomaira C. Figuero-Vasquez, an associate professor of global diaspora studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Register here for this event. 

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.