Location: Virtual

La Cigüapa’s unboundedness—her strange embodiment with backward-facing feet, her connection to the forest, and her refusal to be enclosed in the domestic space—is a framework for transnational AfroDominican women’s experiences of geographical movement, as well as the fluidity of their identities and their constant transformation to the point that it is at times illegible, unattainable, and untraceable. Based on the framework for Omaris Z. Zamora’s first book project, Ciguapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation, author and poet Elizabeth Acevedo, artist Firelei Báez, performance artist Josefina Báez, and Ginetta Candelario, Professor of Sociology and of Latin American & Latino/a Studies at Smith College, will join her in collective dialogue of the critical fabulations of La Ciguapa’s story and the ways it allows them to grapple with the erasure of Blackness, through indigenista mestizaje in the Dominican context as well as the transnational geographies she inhabits. La cigüapa’s story is one of rebellion and marronage grappling with and surviving in the colonial post-apocalypse.

Co-Sponsored by NYU Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) & Center for Black Visual Culture