Description:

Throughout the Winter Quarter, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays from 12-1 PM CT. You can now register (click here) to the seminar on Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 12-1 PM CT, where Professor Jillian Báez (City University of New York) will give a presentation entitled "Performing representational labor: Blackness, Indigeneity, and legibility in global Latina/o/x media cultures." 

Presentation abstract: This presentation explores the representational work and institutional reception of two contemporary transnational icons, singer/actress Amara La Negra and actress Yalitza Aparicio. Through analysis of both women’s engagement in both English-language and Spanish-language media outlets, I argue that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio disrupt the dominant trope of racial ambiguity circulating in transnational media representations of Latina womanhood. In so doing, both women perform both legible and illegible representational labor across the Americas.

Jillian Báez is an associate professor of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media and Citizenship (University of Illinois Press, 2018), recipient of the 2019 Bonnie Ritter Award for Outstanding Feminist Book at the National Communication Association.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program,  and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.