Your Lips: Mapping Afro-Boricua Feminist Becomings

Abstract

Abstract:This cross-genre essay examines how Afro-Latinas in general, and Afro-Puerto Rican women in the diaspora in particular, negotiate race, sex, and belonging within Latinx families and communities. Blending fiction with prose to discuss literary poetics, faithful witnessing, and "world"-travelling, this piece enumerates historical and contemporary practices of relating across difference that are part and parcel of women of color feminisms, decolonial feminist politics, and anti-colonial histories of struggle and resistance. The story "Your Lips" follows a young Afro-Puerto Rican girl's encounter with anti-Black racial logics during a kitchen table conversation between the women in her family. Through prose, artwork, poetry, and short fiction, the essay examines and interrogates the forms of violent intimacies and anti-Black racism that Afro-Latina women and girls experience among their kin, within the academy, and in the world at large.