Professor of English at Bucknell University
From May 23-28, I attended the Inside-Out Center Training Institute, hosted by Temple University. The training was a six-day, 40+ hour program that introduced me to the pedagogy and strategies necessary for developing a course as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. To learn more about my certification through this training, check out my Inside-Out badge.
At the 2021 MLA Convention, I had the fortune of organizing and presiding over a Special Session entitled, “Afro-Latinx Stories,” which is co-sponsored by the MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum and the LLC African American Forum. I want to thank my colleagues in the African American Forum for their collaboration and support, especially, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwanko (Chair) and Jervette Ward, (Secretary).
The panelists included Omaris Z. Zamora, Karina A. Vado, Trent Masiki, and Yomaira C. Figueroa. Check out the abstracts and bios of our panel presenters here: https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/mla2021-afro-latinx-stories/
The LLC Latina and Latino Forum was also able to host a Zoom social event along with the LLC Latina and Latino, Chicana and Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Cuban Diasporic, Literatures of the United States in Languages Other Than English, African American, Caribbean, and Hemispheric American Forums. It was lovely to reconnect with colleagues and friends. Here’s hoping we get to meet in person at the next MLA convention
Join the virtual panel discussion on Wednesday, October 28 at 7:30 PM Eastern/6:30 PM Central about Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s new book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature.
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, 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, and more. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. 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.
Panelists
YOMAIRA C. FIGUEROA-VÁSQUEZ is an associate professor of global diaspora studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES is a professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University. He is the author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke 2008) and a member of the Executive Board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.
LORGIA GARCÍA PEÑA is an associate professor at Harvard University and is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke 2016). Her research poses a dialogue among feminist theory, transnational blackness and Caribbean thought paying close attention to the intersections between coloniality, migration, and racial and ethnic identity formation.
BENITA SAMPEDRO VIZCAYA is a professor of Spanish Colonial Studies at Hofstra University and was the founding Associate Director of Hofstra’s Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice. She is a leading expert on Spanish colonialism in both Africa and Latin America and her work revisits colonial links within and beyond the frame of the different imperial Atlantic networks.
Logistics
• Please register here to receive a link to the Zoom event via email: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/decolonizing-diasporas-a-panel-discussion-tickets-124429914223
• If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to Northwestern University Press through the “Contact” link at the bottom of this page.
• Attendees will receive a discount code during the event.
Co-sponsors
This event is co-sponsored by:
LASA Puerto Rico Section
MLA Global Hispanophone Forum
MLA Latina/o Literature and Culture Forum
The “Afro-Latinx Stories” panel is scheduled as a Special session for the 2021 MLA convention, which will be held entirely online!
The panel will be held on Thursday, January 7, 2020, from 1:45 PM-3:00 PM EST and is co-sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum and the LLC African American Forum.
Check out the complete panel abstract, presenters, and presentation abstracts here: https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/mla2021-afro-latinx-stories/
Panel Abstract: “Afro-Latinx Stories” analyzes Afro-Latinx cultural and literary production. The panel emphasizes the centrality of African diasporic experiences to the formation of Latinidad, while foregrounding the stories that Afro-Latinx people tell about themselves, in their own voices. The privileging of mestizaje and a regime of antiblackness have often led the field of US Latinx Studies to marginalize the creative work of Afro-Latinx people. Literary criticism on US Latinx creative writing has tended to gloss over intra-ethnic racial dynamics to focus on how contemporary texts depict racialization within the United States. In contrast, this panel centers the work of Afro-Latinx writers and artists in order to critique the homogenizing logic of pan-Latinidad. This panel strives to highlight the various historical contexts relevant to situating Afro-Latinx creativity: Civil Rights era art movements, African American literary traditions, scientific technologies such as DNA testing, religious practices, and climate change.
The “Afro-Latinx Stories” panel proposed for the 2021 MLA convention in Toronto has been approved as a Special Session! Co-sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum and the LLC African American Forum.
Check out the complete panel abstract, presenters, and presentation abstracts here: https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/mla2021-afro-latinx-stories/
Panel Abstract: “Afro-Latinx Stories” analyzes Afro-Latinx cultural and literary production. The panel emphasizes the centrality of African diasporic experiences to the formation of Latinidad, while foregrounding the stories that Afro-Latinx people tell about themselves, in their own voices. The privileging of mestizaje and a regime of antiblackness have often led the field of US Latinx Studies to marginalize the creative work of Afro-Latinx people. Literary criticism on US Latinx creative writing has tended to gloss over intra-ethnic racial dynamics to focus on how contemporary texts depict racialization within the United States. In contrast, this panel centers the work of Afro-Latinx writers and artists in order to critique the homogenizing logic of pan-Latinidad. This panel strives to highlight the various historical contexts relevant to situating Afro-Latinx creativity: Civil Rights era art movements, African American literary traditions, scientific technologies such as DNA testing, religious practices, and climate change.
In Latinx Literature Now: Between Evanescence and Event (2019), Ricardo L. Ortiz “suggest[s] that, beginning in 2007 with the appearance of Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez’s The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), […] the field of US Latinx literary studies has certainly experienced an intense and perhaps definitive institutionalization, certainly at least as an academic publishing phenomenon, but also in perhaps less measurable ways as these projects facilitate the teaching of US Latinx Literature courses, organize if not settle what might serve as forms of foundational knowledge for scholarly and critical (and even creative?) work yet to come, and even more indirectly encourage the hiring of more faculty to teach in the field, as more university departments discover the depth, value, and legitimacy of that field, and start finally to feel the urgent need to teach it to an increasingly diverse, and increasingly Latinx, university student body” (73-74).
Check out the essay I recently published in issue #4 of archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, edited by Kaiama L. Glover and Alex Gil.
In “Debt of Gratitude: Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Politics of US Latinx Twitter,” I engage in an analysis of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s invocation of “for you” on Twitter in comparison to those of twelve other US Latinx writers, has two goals: to identify broader key trends in the discursive strategies used on Latinx Twitter and to make the case for the urgent need to ethically document and archive contemporary Latinx Twitter production. The author moves in the direction of generating a public academic archive of Latinx Twitter by publishing online a limited corpus of Miranda’s “for you” tweets as well as comparative visualizations of how Miranda’s use of “for you” in tweets parallels and differs from other Latinx writers’. In addition to modeling the flawed process of archive-building in the hopes of encouraging other scholars to thoughtfully share their own Twitter archive processes, this essay analyzes the strategies used by some US Latinx creative writers to navigate Twitter and how these strategies may speak to the writers’ understanding of the relationship between institutions, audiences, and aesthetics. It specifically highlights the digital work of Cuban American playwright Marissa Chibas, Puerto Rican poet Rich Villar, and Puerto Rican writer Charlie Vázquez on Twitter as a counternarrative to Miranda’s aesthetics. Much work remains to be done in order to understand how Twitter acts as a vehicle for Miranda and the multitude of US Latinx writers who connect with audiences and each other as a means of translating emotion into action or profit or something else altogether.
My essay, “Debt of Gratitude: Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Politics of US Latinx Twitter,” will be appearing in the new issue of archipelagos, which is set to launch on April 2, 2020!
Abstract: This essay, which engages in an analysis of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s invocation of “for you” on Twitter in comparison to those of twelve other US Latinx writers, has two goals: to identify broader key trends in the discursive strategies used on Latinx Twitter and to make the case for the urgent need to ethically document and archive contemporary Latinx Twitter production. The author moves in the direction of generating a public academic archive of Latinx Twitter by publishing online a limited corpus of Miranda’s “for you” tweets as well as comparative visualizations of how Miranda’s use of “for you” in tweets parallels and differs from other Latinx writers’. In addition to modeling the flawed process of archive-building in the hopes of encouraging other scholars to thoughtfully share their own Twitter archive processes, this essay analyzes the strategies used by some US Latinx creative writers to navigate Twitter and how these strategies may speak to the writers’ understanding of the relationship between institutions, audiences, and aesthetics. It specifically highlights the digital work of Cuban American playwright Marissa Chibas, Puerto Rican poet Rich Villar, and Puerto Rican writer Charlie Vázquez on Twitter as a counternarrative to Miranda’s aesthetics. Much work remains to be done in order to understand how Twitter acts as a vehicle for Miranda and the multitude of US Latinx writers who connect with audiences and each other as a means of translating emotion into action or profit or something else altogether.
My monograph, Market Aesthetics, was critically engaged by two scholars recently. Sarah Winstein-Hibbs’s 2019 MELUS article entitled, “A Critical Regionalist Reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Rethinking Magical Realism through Afro-Caribbean Oral Narrative” cites my “convincing” argument (alongside that of Jennifer Harford Vargas) about “Yunior’s ‘dictatorial’ poetics.” Meanwhile, Ruth McHugh-Dillon’s 2018 essay, “Island Mentality: Mapping “de globality ov it all” between Jamaica, England, and Australia in Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Big Islan” in Postcolonial Text references my analysis of the “’pedagogical imperative’ of historical fiction.” What a great way to start 2020, learning about how my research is being read and forms part of the critical conversations in both US Latinx and Caribbean Studies!
I am presiding over the “Latinx Aftershocks” panel at the 2020 MLA convention in Seattle! This panel is sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum.
Check out the complete panel abstract, presenters, and presentation abstracts here:
https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/latinx-aftershocks-mla-2020
Panel Abstract: “Latinx Aftershocks” explores how US Latinx cultural production responds to states of emergency, human rights crises, and disaster capitalism. The panel highlights the dialogue between US Latinx populations and their communities of origin to process the reverberations of such crises. Taking its inspiration from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), the panel considers how the condition of being “disaster-shocked” not only refers to collective devastation by hurricanes or war, but also to neoliberal terms of recovery that require exploitation and dehumanization. The presenters situate their research at the fault lines of disaster capitalism, interrogating who is considered human and how the rights of the citizen are delimited.