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In a virtual panel held on February 22, 2023, three speakers shared their groundbreaking research on the literary and cultural translation of Blackness.
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez (Michigan State University) is the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mapping of Afro-Atlantic Literature.
Ryan James Kernan (Rutgers University) is the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mapping of Afro-Atlantic Literature.
The panel discussion was moderated by Aaron Coleman, Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan.
The speakers on the panel transformed our understanding of Blackness at regional, national, and international scales. The panel also shed light on the Afrodiasporic dimensions of poets like the U.S. Midwest’s Langston Hughes, while envisioning new modes of Afrodiasporic community through digital and archival innovation.
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University and the author of the award-winning Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern 2020). She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, and SX Salon. She is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, the Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English program (MUSE), and the digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a Duke University Mellon Mays SITPA Fellow and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is currently a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and was recently awarded a 2022-2024 $2M Mellon Foundation Higher Learning grant for the collaborative digital humanities/community project “Diasporas Solidarities Lab”.
Ryan James Kernan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where he specializes in African American and African Diasporic literature and theater, Literature of the Americas and translation studies. He has published articles in Comparative Literature, The Langston Hughes Review and Phati’tude and has also been a contributor to American Literary History, the Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel and the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. He is currently editing a volume on Afrofuturism for the University of Minnesota Press with Elizabeth Reich titled Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom. His book New World Maker (2022) reappraises Langston Hughes’s political poetry, reading the writer’s leftist works in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora.
