Please join the Department of Latina/Latino Studies for the next installment of its Speaker Series with Dr. Omaris Zamora.
Abstract: This talk begins with my own critically fabulated story of La Cigüapa, a Dominican folktale figure similar to Mexico's La Llorona, as an exercise for thinking about her character and the historical context in which she is initially imagined. I offer a transnational examination of this figure against the backdrop of colonialism, mining, and neoliberal capitalism from Hispaniola to Washington Heights. Providing this context highlights how La Cigüapa’s aesthetics situates Blackness and gender in the Dominican context to see how Black Dominican women are erased, yet continuously find ways to exist. As seen through transnational Black Dominican cultural producers like Josefina Baez and Firelei Baez, La Cigüapa is a deity, part of our ancestral divine born through colonial catastrophies and neoliberal toxic disasters. She lives and survives because of her rebel spirit of resistance, resilience, and fugitivity. This talk provides the theoretical framework of my forthcoming book rooted in cigüapa aesthetics, which highlights how trance is central to the formation of AfroLatina feminist knowledges that emerge from the embodied memories of racialized and gendered experiences. I call this process of knowledge formation—tranceformation, a theory for AfroLatina feminist epistemologies/ Tranceformation can be a violent process that becomes a catalyst for the formation of new possibilities of being and belonging. The knowledges created as a result of tranceformation are often carried out by knowledge producers the world does not recognize as such—they transmit these knowledges through multiple platforms, not just the written word.
Bio: Omaris Z. Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches. Her forthcoming book, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation examines the transnational Black Dominican narratives put forth in the work of Firelei Baez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nelly Rosario, Ana Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, Cardi B, and La Bella Chanel. Zamora pays close attention to how they embody their blackness, produce knowledge, and shift the geographies of black feminism. Her work has been published in Small Axe, The Black Scholar, Post45, Latinx Talk, Label Me Latina/o, among others and has been featured on Telemundo Chicago, the New Jersey State Ledger, NPR’s Alt.Latino podcast, ABC Chicago’s Windy City Live, and on VICE. She fuses her poetry with her scholarly work as a way of contributing to a black poetic approach to cultural studies.