“Decolonizing Diasporas: Destierro in Afro-Atlantic Literature”
A guest lecture by Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa (Michigan State University)
Yomaira Figueroa is assistant professor of Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in the department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her book project, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, focuses on diasporic/exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Equatoguinean texts in contact. She has published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the journal of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, CENTRO Journal, and SX Salon. She is currently a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University.
This talk discusses some of the relational preoccupations and frameworks in the Afro-Atlantic archipelago, specifically the Afro-Latinx Caribbean and Equatoguinean literary corpus written in diaspora. I trace how the concept of destierro makes a contribution to decolonizing discourses and examine how it appears in the work of Loida Martiza Perez and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel.
