About this Event
Join us for a presentation by this year’s MJR fellow Daniel Morales Armstrong, a retelling of the emancipation story in PR through the archival records of the formerly enslaved people who redefined the meaning of freedom in the colony. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with Ashley Coleman Taylor (UT Austin), Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, which will focus on how Black Puerto Ricans in the diaspora are writing about and reckoning with the legacies of slavery in our work across disciplines/genres. This conversation – largely about memory as well as methods – will have a particular focus on engagement with the archives through traditional and non-traditional means. The event will conclude with a call to action for the audience to engage the archives of Puerto Rico with an appropriate, person-centered ethos of care - and the sharing of resources aimed at increasing access to those archival collections.
Panelists
Ashley Coleman Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and religious experience in the Caribbean the U.S. South. A proud southerner of circum-Caribbean descent, Dr. Coleman Taylor was born, raised, and educated in the city of Atlanta, GA. As a Black feminist Africana religionist and gender studies she examines the corporeal complexities of Black women in Puerto Rico and longtime LGBT activists in Atlanta, Georgia. Locating the religious in the mundane, her work tends to the materiality of the body and land/space/place while highlighting the intersections of experience and corporeality for African diasporic subjects. Dr. Coleman Taylor’s first manuscript-in-progress, Majestad Negra: Race, Gender and Religious Experience in Puerto Rico, is an interventionist ethnography interrogating how early modern religious constructions of embodied “Otherness” inform contemporary ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. It examines the ways Afro-Puerto Rican women, as Black subjects, employ resistive corporeal strategies to self-define their reality and construct counternarratives of being.
Dr. Coleman Taylor’s research has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Academy of University Women (AAUW), the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+), the James Weldon Johnson Institute, and the Arcus Foundation. Her work has also been supported by nonprofit organizations Counter Narrative Project and Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative (SnapCo).
You can find her scholarly work in avenues including the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, PMLA, and the Africana Studies Review.
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s historical fiction examines the journey of the Afro Puerto Rican people from mid-19th century Africa through the Vietnam War. Her first two books of her five-book series, told from the women characters’ perspective, include Daughters of the Stone (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), shortlisted for the 2010 PEN Bingham Award, and A Woman of Endurance (published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2022). The Spanish-language edition, Indómita, was published the same year. was selected to represent Puerto Rico in the 2024 Library of Congress, Great Books, Great Places
initiative presented at the 2024 National Book Festival. A Woman of Endurance and Indómita won the Bronze and Gold International Latino Book Award medals, respectively in 2024. In 2024, the Brazilian edition was published by Primavera. Ms. Llanos-Figueroa was awarded the 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and the Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Award in 2022. She is an alumna of MacDowell, Macondo, Hedgebrook, VONA and Kimbilio, among others.
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies and is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY Hunter. She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations.
A first-generation high-school and college graduate, Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez is passionate about mentoring underrepresented and first-generation students. She earned her BA in English, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. At her former institution, Michigan State University) she founded the Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English Program (MUSE), the Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the award-winning digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. She is the PI of the 2022-2027 “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $4M Mellon Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies and leads the CENTRO “Rooted and Relational” Initiative, a $6.48M project supported by the Mellon Presidential Initiatives.
Daniel Morales-Armstrong is a Black DiaspoRican historian and educator from The Bronx whose work focuses on slavery and emancipation in Puerto Rico. Morales-Armstrong earned his joint PhD in History and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, after which he joined the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) at CUNY Hunter College as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. His scholarship examines how formerly enslaved Puerto Ricans (“libertos”) resisted the three-year forced labor mandate that followed emancipation in the colony, as well as the silences surrounding these acts of refusal. Morales-Armstrong is working on a series of methods essays focused on how Black Puerto Ricans in the present - in the diaspora and the archipelago - relate to and engage the archives of Puerto Rican slavery. His research has been generously funded by the Ford Foundation, the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, Centro, and now, The Latinx Project.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
20 Cooper Sq, 20 Cooper Square, New York, United States
USD 0.00
