Archives of Indictment: Afro-Latinx & Equatorial Guinean Studies

How do we map relations across the Afro-Atlantic? How do the diasporic cultural productions of the sole Spanish-speaking nation in Subsaharan Africa connect with works emerging from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic)? What insights do we gain by reading these contemporary works alongside each other? This talk will examine the long history of Atlantic crossings between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean and engage in a robust discussion about colonialism, diaspora, feminisms, decolonization, literature, and the human. We will examine how themes of intimacy, witnessing, destierro, reparations, and futurities are remapped in a series of works and will consider how Black diasporic histories are impacted by interlocking structures of oppression and trace the often-peripheralize Afro-Atlantic through a set of diasporic texts and come to understand how they not only reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.
In centering the cultural productions of peoples of African descent this talk argues that Afro-diasporic imaginaries subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

Yomaira Figueroa is Associate Professor of Global Diaspora Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her most recent book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern), 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.

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