The Head That Remains

Abstract:This essay examines the undertheorization of Afro-Latin American women and the underrepresentation of Afro-Latin American women as thinkers within the field of Latin American cultural theory. In particular, it elucidates how the bodily dismemberment, silence, and absorption of Afro-Latin American women is necessary for the constitution of mestizaje as a still-prevailing foundational cultural theory of Latin America. The essay unfolds via a critical reading of the decapitation of an Afro-descendant woman in Puerto Rican-Dominican writer Pedro Cabiya’s science-fiction tale La cabeza. It reads the dismemberment and transplantation of the Black woman’s remaining body in Cabiya’s text as an exemplary allegory of mestizaje, and links the emancipatory gesture of mestizaje to the condition of possibility of other forms of freedom that, ultimately, require the coercion, violation, and erasure of Afro-Latin American women. It asks how we might make space for the constitution of Black feminist studies in Latin America by remaining attentive to the severed presence of Afro-Latin American women.