Event Description
In Caribes 2.0, author Jossianna Arroyo looks at the Caribbean mediasphere in the 21st century. Arroyo argues that we have seen the return of tropes such as blackface, brownface, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and violent representations of the poor, the marginalized, and the racialized. Caribes 2.0 looks at these tropes and the work of writers, vloggers, performers, and photographers who have become media figures or have used new media platforms to promote their work and examines how they are challenging and negotiating these media representations. It analyzes contemporary Caribbean cultures to discuss the tastes, guides, and actions (social and virtual) that shape Caribbean global communities today. Departing from Edouard Glissant’s insight that “Caribbean reality might not be accessed by remote control,” the book considers what types of political and social agencies have been created by mediation. Caribes 2.0 deviates from these historical-globalized views of subjected, colonized Caribbean bodies and their material conditions to examine the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary Caribbean cultures and the role that media is playing in the invisibility or hyper-visibility of Caribbean cultures in the islands and the U.S. diaspora.
Speaker
Jossianna Arroyo is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in the analysis of Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures in the Americas, queer studies, colonial and post-colonial theories in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Cosponsors
Organized by Daylet Domínguez and co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Race and Gender.