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Kiana González Cedeño
Texas Christian University
Kiana González Cedeño (she/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. She got her Ph.D. from the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Gonzalez-Cedeño’s work utilizes lamentation as a theoretical framework that exposes and elevates un(der)told histories of Puerto Rico. She looks at popular culture as a corpus that demonstrates the ways Black Puerto Ricans have refused and rebelled against colonial empire since the start of modernity. She is also a solidarity fellow with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab and works on building digital archives of Afro-Descendant women in the Caribbean surviving ecological disasters. You can find her writing in Centro Journal.
Talk Information:
The Modern/Colonial City Lament: A Decolonial Response to Ecological Catastrophe in the Caribbean
November 22, 2024 | 12:00 AM
Drawing from medieval theories of lamentation, I analyze Huracanada (2018) by Mayra Santos Febres to show how her lamentations of the destruction of Puerto Rico counteract hegemonic records of Hurricane María in 2017. I argue that her work falls within a category I denote as a modern/colonial city lament, which responds to the legacies modernity in the Caribbean via city laments. Leaning on the frameworks of Tamar Boyadjian (2018), I propose modern/colonial city laments as a decolonial feminist archiving practice, where lamentation serves as a counter-narrative to the records of the state after any given catastrophe. I focus on Santos Febres because of her great legacy in Puerto Rico and her positionality as an Afro-Caribbean. By focusing on her work, I center the lamentations of a community that has been largely marginalized in Puerto Rico. To read her work as a modern/colonial city lament permits us to bear witness to the catharsis of Puerto Ricans in times of ecological disaster, exacerbated by the archipelago’s political status.