Course Description

“¡Me gritaron negra!”—a powerful line from Afro-Peruvian poet Victoria Santa Cruz’s poem—is an invocation of Franz Fanon’s idea of the fact of Blackness and Miriam Jimenez-Roman and Juan Flores’s “the fact of Afro-Latinidad.” That is: the recognition of the intersection of her Blackness and her womanhood in a way that is othering and implies that her presence is threatening. This is the experience of many Afro-Latinas who are hypervisible, invisible, or erased from dialogues rooted in white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. Hence, many Afro-Latinas have created ways of empowering themselves and their communities, paving the way for broadening our understanding of the African diaspora, Latinidad, gender, sexuality, and more. This class introduces students to ideas of AfroLatinx feminisms through transnational cultural and theoretical analysis of cultural production put forth by AfroLatina/x women, trans women and femmes. We will be guided by the approaches and methods of various AfroLatina/x feminist thinkers in analyzing art, poetry, essays, and performance from Cardi B, Firelei Baez, Tokischa, Ariana Brown, Elizabeth Acevedo, amongst others. By the end of the course, students will have an understanding of AfroLatinx feminist knowledges, formations and cultural production. Students will work collaboratively to produce an AfroLatinx feminist media archive that will be widely available to the public.