Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature

302 Pages·2020·9.914 MB·English

by  Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez

Decolonizing
Diasporas

Decolonizing
Diasporas
Radical Mappings of
Afro- Atlantic Literature
Yomaira C. Figueroa- Vásquez
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press.
Published 2020. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Figueroa- Vásquez, Yomaira C, author.
Title: Decolonial diasporas : radical mappings of Afro Atlantic
literatures / Yomaira C. Figueroa- Vásquez.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018934 | ISBN 9780810142428 (paperback) | ISBN
9780810142435 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810142442 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean literature (Spanish)— History and
criticism. | Equatorial Guinean literature (Spanish)— History and
criticism. | African diaspora in literature. | Postcolonialism in literature.
Classification: LCC PQ7361 .F54 2021 | DDC 860.99729— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018934
Para los Santos
Santos Vásquez-Rivera
Marcelino Santos-Figueroa
Santa Figueroa-Vásquez

The proposal I am making is that such a discipline can only
emerge with an overall rewriting of knowledge, as the re-
enacting of the original heresy of a Studia, reinvented as a
science of human systems, from the liminal perspective of the
“base” (Dewey, 1950) new Studies, whose revelatory heresy
lies in their definition of themselves away from the Chaos roles
in which they had been defined— Black from Negro, Chicano
from Mexican American, Feminists from Women, etc. For
these have revealed the connection between the way we iden-
tify ourselves and the way we act upon/know the world.
— Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must
Be Found after Humanism”

Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Note on Language and Translation xxi
Preface xxiii
Introduction
Relations 1
Chapter 1
Intimacies 31
Chapter 2
Witnessing 65
Chapter 3
Destierro 89
Chapter 4
Reparations 117
Chapter 5
Apocalypso 147
Coda
Sea 181
Notes 193
Bibliography 233
Index 255