Event Description
Join the Caribbean Thought Event Series for an afternoon with Jade Power-Sotomayor, a Cali-Rican scholar, educator, and performer whose work centers on embodiment, memory, and performance in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Dr. Power-Sotomayor will reflect on Bomba as a practice of resistance, repair, and imagination in Puerto Rico and beyond. The program will conclude with a Bomba performance by local Cali-Rican practitioners, showcasing the rhythms, dances, and collective spirit of Puerto Rico’s oldest Afro-Indigenous tradition.
Speaker
Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Engaging with discourses of embodiment and embodied practices of remembering and creating community, her work focuses on the fluid reconstitution of Latinx identity ultimately produced by doing and not simply being. Overall, she seeks to promote an in-depth engagement with Latinx performance-making as a framework for taking up the most salient issues of our time: colonialism, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, economic disparity, patriarchy and misogyny, queer and transphobia, ableism and mental health access, climate catastrophe and environmental justice. More than just including historically occulted voices as a form of ethnographic encounter, she looks to these instances of performance for what they reveal about the structures of power and social dynamics that have shaped the world we collectively share. Her research interests include: Latinx theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife, eco-dramaturgies, epistemologies of the body, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora.
Co-sponsorship
Co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender, the Latinx Research Center, the Department of Geography, the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies.