[Many thanks to Humberto García-Muñiz—Director, Instituto de Estudios del Caribe, UPR-RP—for bringing this item to our attention.]

The Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS) [Instituto de Estudios del Caribe (IEC)] at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras presents the 7th Gordon K. & Sybil Lewis Annual Memorial Lecture. The lecture will be delivered by Yolanda Martínez San Miguel (Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies, University of Miami) on September 7, 2023, from 1:00 to 3:30pm at the Milton Pabón Amphitheater, at 238 Ramón Emeterio Betances Building (REB), School of Social Sciences, UPR-RP. The title of her talk is “Oralidad, colonialidad y memoria: Meditaciones metodológicas para una agenda caribeñista en el siglo 21” [Orality, coloniality and memory: Methodological meditations for a Caribbean agenda in the 21^st century].

Description: Remembering is a difficult process in the Caribbean, given the context of multiple, long-lasting colonialities, and the linguistic, geographic, and political fragmentation in the area. In this presentation, I dialogue critically with the ideas of B. Christian, M.-R. Trouillot, E. Glissant, A. Díaz Quiñones, S. Puri, A. Fernández, V. Clark and S. Wynter on narrative as a decolonial epistemic intervention. I am interested in adapting post-memory and trauma studies to understand the postcolonial and decolonial trans-local specificity of the insular Caribbean and expanding on the findings of scholars focused on diaspora work. I use the Caribbean Women’s Legacy Project to reflect on successes and challenges in memory studies in the Caribbean. Following the debates on community archives and J. Bastian’s studies on the ethical articulation of postcolonial archives in the Caribbean, I consider research methods that remedy their gaps and produce alternative theories. I conclude with the pioneering work of Gordon K. Lewis and Sybil F. Lewis to think about the ways in which they identified some central edges in the configuration of a Caribbean studies agenda that respond to the needs and knowledge of the region.

YOLANDA MARTÍNEZ-SAN MIGUEL is a specialist in colonial, postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literature. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (1999); Caribbean Two-Ways?: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003); From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking IntraColonial Migration in a Pan-Caribbean Context (2014). She has co-edited: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (with Ben. Sifuentes Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, 2016), Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (with Sarah Tobias, 2016), Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (with Michelle Stephens, 2020) and the Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (with Santa Arias, 2021). She is a columnist for 80grados and founding co-editor of the “Critical Caribbean Studies” series at Rutgers University Press.

Comments and suggestions on this presentation will be welcome at: iec@uprrp.edu

For further information, you may contact Dr. Humberto García Muñiz, Director, at iec@uprrp.edu

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