Decolonizing Black Latinidad: Garifuna New Yorkers in Diaspora

Paul Joseph López Oro, Assistant Professor and Program Director of Africana Studies, Bryn Mawr College

December 5, 2024; 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM    

Woody Tanger Auditorium, BC Library

Prof. López Oro will discuss how Black Central Americans in the United States disrupt the fixtures and tropes of AfroLatinidad, by problematizing Black Indigeneity as foundational to U.S. AfroLatinidades.

Dr. López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black studies scholar whose research and teaching lie at the hemispheric intersections of Black Latin American and U.S. AfroLatinx social movements, Black Queer Feminisms, and Black ethnographies in the Américas. His forthcoming book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer World-Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva Yol' is a critical ethnography on how gender and sexuality shape the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and self-make their multiple subjectivities as Black/Indigenous/Caribbean AfroLatinxs. 

Sponsored by: The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, The Office of the Provost, The Department of Africana Studies, and The CUNY Haitian Studies Institute; along with the departments of History, Philosophy, Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, and Sociology; programs in American Studies and in Caribbean Studies; The Center for the Study of Brooklyn; The LGBTQ+ Resource Center; The Black and Latino Male Initiative; The Immigrant Student Success Office; and The Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College.