Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez will be presenting a talk based on her new book manuscript titled The Survival of a People, where she traces the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Ricans in the colonial archive and in contemporary cultural memory from the late 19th century to the present. A personally inflected project, the talk will use alternative archives—including photography and film—of Afro-Puerto Rican life produced on the island and the diaspora.
Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translated by Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found inHypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations.
This event is part of the “Archives in the Americas” Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshop in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Image credit: Christina in Barrio Tokio, Puerto Rico, 1981 [Frank Espada’s The Puerto Rican Diaspora Project]
