4B. Current Transnational Research I: Historical and Cultural Flows
4:00pm-5:30pm
Interdisciplinary panel to present current transnational research that advances a dialogue on issues of importance to Black Latin@s in the United States as well as foster positive relations between Latin@s, African Americans and other peoples of color.
Interdisciplinary panel to present current transnational research that advances a dialogue on issues of importance to Black Latin@s in the United States as well as foster positive relations between Latin@s, African Americans and other peoples of color.
Presenters
Maya Berry is a third-generation Cuban-American and an artist-scholar of Afro-Cuban dance. She completed her Master's degree in performance studies at New York University and is currently a doctoral student of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. A Ford Foundation Fellow, her work looks at the performance and management of ‘national culture’ as a window into the nature of Afro-Cuban representation within both the nation-state and the national imaginary of Cuba from abroad. Her aim is to contribute to conversations about the hindrances and avenues to the increased political participation of African descendants in the Americas.
Paper: “’Como Ayer’: A Performance of Citizenship in New Jersey’s Cuba of Tomorrow” |
Aisha Z. Cort is an independent scholar whose studies have focused on race and identity issues within the Afro-Latin@ population. A graduate of Yale University, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University in Spanish literature with a focus on Afro-Latin@ culture and contemporary Caribbean literature. Her dissertation, "Negrometraje, Literature and Race in Revolutionary Cuba" focuses on the negotiation of race, revolution and art in the work of Afro-Cuban artists of the 1970s and 1990s in revolutionary Cuba.
Paper:“Black Cuban, Black American: Reading Afro-Latino Identities” |
T.J. Desch-Obi is a scholar of African and African diaspora history who received his doctorate in African history from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on historical linguistics and the history of African and African diaspora martial arts, culture, spirituality, and historical ethnography. He teaches in the departments of history, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and religion at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. He is the author of Fighting For Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World, which won the Hines Prize for best book on Atlantic History. His current project focuses on the nineteenth century martial arts tradition of Afro-Colombians and twentieth century African and Latin American prison fighting.
Paper: “Negros Macheteros”: Afro-Latino Martial Arts in the Popular Imagination” |
Laurence E. Prescott is professor of Spanish and African American Studies at Penn State University. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Spanish from Indiana University (Bloomington). His books include Candelario Obeso y la iniciación de la poesía negra en Colombia (Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1985) and Without Hatreds or Fears: Jorge Artel and the Struggle for Black Literary Expression in Colombia (2000), which received a Choice Magazine 2001 Outstanding Academic Title award. His publications include “Brother to Brother: The Friendship and Literary Correspondence of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Langston Hughes” (2006) and “Journeying through Jim Crow: Spanish American Travelers in the United States during the Age of Segregation” (2007). He co-founded the Afro-Latin/American Research Association (ALARA). His current research projects focus on African American life and culture in Latin American travel writings, and the compilation of a bio-bibliography of Afro-Colombian writers.
Paper: “Remembering the Source: Reflections on Afro-Latin American Resistance and the Impact of the African American Struggle” |
Jill Toliver Richardson is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Her article “Gendered Migrations: The Migratory Experience in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home” is featured in the inaugural issue of Label Me Latina/o: Journal of Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Latino Literary Production (March 2011). Her research interests include Afro-Caribbean literature, postcolonial studies, and hip hop studies.
Paper: “Enduring the Curse: The Legacy of Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’sThe Brief Wondrous" |
Moderator
Puerto Rican born and raised in Spanish Harlem and alumnus of the Bronx Community College "Operation Second Chance Program, Roberto Márquez is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. The recipient in 2002 of the Nicolas Guillén Centennial Commemorative Medal, he is the editor of the bilingual anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry (1974), translator-editor of Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology From Aborigianl To Contemporary Times, which won the 2008 New England Council of Latin American Studies' (NECLAS) Translation Prize; and is the author, most recently, of A World Among These Islands: Essays On Literature, Race, And National Identity In Antillean America.
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