Feeling Empire and Decolonial Emotions in Afro-Puerto Rican Choreographies

• In Event: Feeling Empire and Facing the Future: A Reckoning and Rupture

Abstract

Archives are technologies of surveillance and imperial importance, which is why methodological interventions like critical fabulation (Hartman 2008) and reading for intimacies or solidarities across continents (Lowe 2015) have been made. This paper situates Afro-Puerto Rican bomba as a method and site of articulating Black Puerto Rican embodiment against and under empire. I use ethnographic findings from field research in tandem with archival documents pertaining to pre- and post emancipation Puerto Rico to work in tandem to analyze the history of feelings amongst Afro-Puerto Rican women. From this history, I analyze how Afro-Puerto Rican women have endured under colonialism and also developed decolonial practices in their everyday networks of relations.

Author

• Sarah Bruno, Michigan State University