How do we map relations across the Afro-Atlantic? How do the diasporic cultural productions of the sole Spanish-speaking nation in Subsaharan Africa connect with works emerging from Afro-Cuban, Afro-Puerto Rico, and Afro-Dominican diasporas? What insights do we gain by reading these contemporary works alongside each other? This lecture will examine the long history of Atlantic crossings between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean and engage in a robust discussion about colonialism, diaspora, and decolonial feminisms and relationality. We will trace how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in a series of works and will consider how Black diasporic histories are impacted by interlocking structures of oppression. By centering often-peripheralized Afro-Atlantic peoples through a set of diasporic texts we can come to understand how they not only reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of archipelagic thought.
