Celebrating #DecolonizingDiasporas & #WickedFlesh
Electric.Marronage wants to congratulate our curators, Drs. Jessica Marie Johnson and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, on the publications of their first books. Thank you both for your leadership and for these phenomenal works. Press play for a small surprise.
DR. YOMAIRA C. FIGUEROA-VÁSQUEZ
“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.
Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.
This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.”
“Decolonizing Diasporas maps decolonial poetics through a sustained engagement with the multiple perspectives, experiences, histories, and lived realities of different peoples living under various conditions of colonialism...as well as the radical resistance and imaginations they use to counter these structures of oppression. ”
DR. JESSICA MARIE JOHNSON
“The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.
The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.
Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African
women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through
active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their
stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that
laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and re-
shaped the New World.”
“. . . Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through an active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practice. Their stories, both in their successes and failures, outline a practice of freedom that would shape the city that emerged on the shores of the Mississippi and laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles and tensions of the nineteenth century.”