YOMAIRA C. FIGUEROA-VÁSQUEZ, PH.D.

Yomaira's first book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, October 2020), focuses on diasporic and exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Equatoguinean texts in contact. Framed with critical attention to decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, and feminist philosophy, the book complicates and enriches ongoing conversations and debates about diaspora Black, Latinx, and Hispanophone studies through a sustained engagement with politics, poetics and cultural productions. She examines five arcs in the Afro-Atlantic literary corpus including: the intimacy of dictatorship, the act of faithful witnessing, the condition of destierro, reparations as decolonial love, and Afro-futurities/Afro-apocalypsos. Decolonizing Diasporas was awarded the 2021 MLA Prize in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literary and Cultural Studies.

Yomaira’s current book project, The Survival of a People, examines the disappearance and excesses of Afro-Puerto Ricans in colonial archives, photography, visual art, and film on the island and in diaspora from the 19th century to the present. The book engages Frank Espada’s The Puerto Rican Diaspora Project, the art of Jean Michel Basquiat, and the films Living Los Sures (1984/2016), The World of Piri Thomas (1968), and Delivered Vacant (1992).

Yomaira is the author of "Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial Readings of Shadows of Your Black Memory and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" which was awarded the 2015 Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy Diversity Essay Prize. Other publications include: "Reparation as transformation: Radical literary (re)imaginings of futurities through decolonial love" (Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society), "The Life Work of Ana Celia Zentella: Anthropolitical Linguistics, Bilingualism, and Linguistic Communities at a Crossroads", (CENTRO Journal), “After the Hurricane: Decolonial Feminisms & Destierro.” (Hypatia a Journal of Feminist Philosophy), and “Afro-Boricua Archives: Paperless People and Photo/Poetics as Resistance.” (Post 45). Her other publications can be viewed in her abbreviated vitae.

In addition to these academic projects Yomaira writes poetry and short fiction. She is currently working on a series of writing projects including Pelo Vivo, a collection of short stories on race, sex, and belonging.