This is America: Re-creating Afro-Diasporic Contemporary Literary and Cultural Discourses

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores Afro-Diasporic contemporary literary and cultural discourses. Within historical legacies of colonialism, blackness has always been a site of contradictions, negotiations, and struggles across the Americas. The presentations in this panel examine how artists of the African Diaspora in the Americas have represented the complexities of becoming and being what Audre Lorde has called “the hyphenated people of the diaspora” (2009). The artistic works discussed in the panel include literary and visual art projects that highlight issues of national belonging and community-making that dialogue with social and political movements/moments within and outside of the U.S. The presentations make theoretical and critical interventions that privilege nuanced layers of Afro-Latino/a, U.S. African American, and Afro-Brazilian cultural, intellectual and historical contexts from late twentieth century to the present. In doing so, we hope to expand and deepen the scholarly conversation about how Afro-Diasporic artists have engaged in re-creating and representing Afro-identities within the intersections of politics, community, and nation across the Americas.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Trent Masiki, Boston University

Chair

• Flávia Santos de Araújo, Smith College

Individual Presentations

• The Pitfalls of Transcultural Ascension in Veronica Chamber’s "Mama’s Girl" - Trent Masiki, Boston University

• “Observe and Participate”: Jesús Colón, the New York Young Lords, and the Tradition of Afro-Puerto Rican Socialist Life Writing - Regina Mills, Texas A/M University

• Writing Prietica in Quinnehtukqut: Marianela Medrano’s Decolonial Racial and Feminist Negotiations - Isabel Espinal, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• "Becos da Memória", by Conceição Evaristo: Writing the Memory of the Afro-Brazilian Woman - Eliza Araújo

• Rosana Paulino and the Art of Refazimento: Reconfigurations of the Black Female Body in the Land of Racial Democracy - Flávia Santos de Araújo, Smith College