Fall 2020 Afrolatin Coalition Series: Past Events: News + Events: Latin American Music Center: Indiana University

Fall 2020: Afrolatin Coalitions in Culture and the Arts Series

A campus-wide collaboration celebrating Afrolatin culture through interdisciplinary scholarship

The following lectures are available for streaming below:

Book Presentation—Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures
- Solimar Otero, Folklore and Ethnomusicology | Latino Studies
Lecture—“Im/positions: Nominalizing the Black Aesthetic in Puerto Rico”
- Judith Rodríguez, African American and Diaspora Studies | Latino Studies
Reading/Dance Performance—Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman
in the Twentieth Century
- Beatrice Capote, Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance
Film Screening/Discussion—Karibú
- Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center, Jacobs School of Music
Lecture—“‘We Cannot Separate Our Pain from Our Resistance’: Trauma and Political Activism in the Black and Brown Freedom Movements"
- Sonia Lee, American Studies | Latino Studies

Recorded Events

Book Presentation: Solimar Otero, Archives of ConjureIn Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. Solimar Otero's Archives of Conjure (Columbia University Press 2020), explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race.

Lecture: Judith Rodríguez, "Im/positions: Nominalizing the Black Aesthetic in Puerto Rico" This paper engages the aesthetic modes of racial discourse in the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to understand the economy of desire which reproduces ethnonational representation in Puerto Rico. In doing so, this paper performs a double move that follows the significance of the aesthetic as an imposition of ethnonationalism on one end, and illuminates its interpellation of desire on the other. As such, this paper creates a push and pull effect that encapsulates a frame of reference for multiple histories and geographies that both reproduce and refuse ethnonationalism in general in Puerto Rico.

Lecture & Performance: Beatrice Capote, “Iya la panza, panza, Iya”Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century written by Maria de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, discusses the story of her grandmother, parents and her experience of slavery, prejudice, gender biases colorism and racism during the Cuban Independence War and the abolition of Slavery in 1898. This presentation will include a reading from the biographical novel Reyita followed by a Dance Performance dedicated to the embodiment of Reyita’s story.

Javier F. León, Film Screening/Discussion—Karibú In 2000, the newly formed music and theater collective Grupo Teatro del Milenio produced an short experimental play Karibú. Written collectively by the founding members of the group, the play critiqued the role that black performers have historically had in Peruvian society, simultaneously beloved and marginalized by the largely non-black audiences that claim their music as an expression of cultural diversity. In celebration of Teatro del Milenio’s 20th anniversary, this presentation will feature a virtual screening of a revival production of Karibú that took place in Atlanta in 2007 and will be accompanied by an introduction and post-screening discussion hosted by Javier León, who has worked with various members of the groups for more than fifteen years.

Sonia Lee, "'We Cannot Separate Our Pain from Our Resistance'": Trauma and Political Activism in the Black and Brown Freedom Movements My paper seeks to analyze the relationship between trauma and political activism among African Americans and Latinos in order to reveal the full humanity of freedom fighters. With a few exceptions, too many narratives of the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano freedom movements of the 1960s and 70s portray political activists as flawless individuals who bore the sting of racial trauma, but were impervious to psychological harm and seamlessly channeled their anger into political action. Such a narrative, however, has falsely portrayed freedom fighters as people who are perfect, and as a result, their stories have become inaccessible to many of us. By focusing on the narratives of individuals who wrestled with tremendous mental suffering, and yet translated their suffering into a political vision, I hope to reveal a more realistic and tangible narrative of the freedom movements of the 1960s and 70s