Cheers to Your Tenure: A Celebration of Dr. Yomaira Figueroa
Electric Marronage is excited to announce Dr. Yomaira Figueroa’s tenure as Associate Professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Figueroa, EM’s co-founder and co-curator, holds appointments in the Department of English, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Chicano/Latino Studies Program where she teaches a range of courses including “Poetics of Liberation and Relation,” “Decoloniality, Diaspora, and the Human,” and “Afro-Diasporas and the Global Metropoles.” She is co-founder of the Womxn of Color Initiatives and a pioneer of MSU’s Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English (MUSE). She also played a major role in spearheading the Puerto Rico Palabras Study Away program for graduate students, a program that aims to increase cultural and political awareness of the island. Her commitment to highlighting the voices, lives, and experiences of those in the margins is reflected in every aspect of her work.
As current graduate students of Dr. Figueroa, we want to applaud her efforts inside and outside of the classroom. Her graduate seminars this past Spring spoke to her commitment to community engaged scholarship. Amid the pandemic, Dr. Figueroa’s curriculum centered histories of Black and Indigenous peoples, acknowledged relationalities across communities, and pinpointed how narratives of resistance emerge despite colonization. She brought forth guest speakers such as Raquel Salas Rivera and journalist Sandra D. Rodríguez Cotto, allowing students to ask questions regarding their own research and professional trajectories. Both her physical and virtual classrooms created an intimate space where we identified the personal as political and learned how to both analyze and navigate the politics of settler-colonial nations and other forms of coloniality.
Dr. Figueroa’s ongoing commitment to underrepresented scholars manifests in her book Decolonizing Diasporas, which centers literature from Equatorial Guinea and connects it to other Afro-Latinx literatures to have broader conversations of colonialism, exile, hetero-patriarchy, diaspora, and more.
DID WE MENTION SHE’S FIRST-GENERATION?
The electricians offer our appreciation for all the work Dr. Figueroa has dedicated to the department and to her graduate students! Thank you for inspiring other first-gen’s like us, for carving space in the academy for underrepresented voices like us, and for teaching us everything from how to love across differences to how to abolish the carceral state.
Find Decolonizing Diasporas, here on October 15, 2020.