Re-Membering Ourselves: Afro-Atlantic Praxes of Memory, Pleasure, and the Sacred

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The papers in this panel mobilize queer, feminist and Latinx approaches to the scandalous, the indecent, and the unknowable to bridge Latinx, Latin American, and Afro-Diasporic studies. The work of artists Enrique Chagoya, Yinka Shonibare, and Achy Obejas, set in dialogue and juxtaposed with the writings of the late Gloria Anzaldúa and Marchella Althaus-Reid, among others, set the stage for a consideration of the barbaric and cannibalistic, memorialization, the indecent, and the complicated trajectories of the dyad conocimiento/desconocimiento in relation to one another. Drawing from contemporary art, literature, theology, critical theory and activist theorizing, these papers aim to reframe and reposition Latinx studies as a distinctly hemispheric project, poised through its inflection by cutting edge aesthetic, queer, and feminist critiques to support novel and rigorous explorations of the usefulness of the sensorial and visceral to its objects and projects of inquiry.

Sub Track

• Latinx Studies

Session Organizer

• Carlos U Decena, Rutgers University

Chair

• Leticia Alvarado, Brown University, American Studies

Individual Presentations

• Testing the Limits: Achy Obejas’s Badagry Diaspora and the Atlantic World (B)order - Sarah M Quesada, University of Notre Dame

• Indecent Conocimientos: A Queer of Color Peregrinaje - Carlos U Decena, Rutgers University

• Aesthetic cuts: Enrique Chagoya + Yinka Shonibare - Leticia Alvarado, Brown University, American Studies