Description:

Yomaira Figueroa,
Assistant Professor of Afro Diaspora Studies in the department of English and the African American & African Studies Program at Michigan State University.

This talk examines how futurities emerge in Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diasporic poetics. I trace some of the ways in which the works of singers Ibeyi and writers Junot Díaz, Daniel Jose Older, and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, trouble tropes of racialized Blackness, conjure apocalyptic worlds, and center Lucumí and other syncretic ritual practices. I contend that rather than imagining utopian liberation or dystopian futures, they conceive of worlds/otherwise as apocalypsos that are rooted in the ruptures of modernity and coloniality.

Free & Open to the Public.
Refreshments will be provided.