Paul Humphrey (Colgate University): Oceanic Archives and Afrodiasporic Spirituality in Comics from the Caribbean Diaspora
| Dates: | 30 January 2023 |
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| Times: | All day |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Paul Humphrey |
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Part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.
This event will be online: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstrac: This presentation analyses the intersections of Afrodiasporic spirituality and the sea in Nuyorican creator Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s La Borinqueña and Haitian-American writer Greg Anderson-Elysée’s Marassa. Framed by the notion of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea as oceanic archives (DeLoughrey 2017), it explores how these comics reject the colonial designation of the sea as aqua nullius and weave many histories, stories and mythologies into the fabric of the transatlantic space in which they are situated. At the same time, these comics challenge the extractivism and exploitation of coloniality to foreground reciprocal relationships between the human, nonhuman and more-than-human. Drawing on ancestral and ritual knowledge and the many “sea ontologies” of the waters (DeLoughrey 2017), the analysis places these narratives into conversation with the work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Christina Sharpe and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, among others, to discern the ways that Santería, Vodou and Taíno spiritualities present a decolonial framework for engagement with the environment in our contemporary moment.
Speaker
Paul Humphrey
Role: Associate Professor, LGBTQ Studies and Africana & Latin American Studies
Organisation: Colgate University
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