Show notes
This podcast features a conversation Profs. Carole Boyce Davies, Yomaira Figueroa and Bedour Alagraa on Sylvia Wynter, Caribbean philosophy and the intellectual contributions of Black women to the Americas. It was recorded during the Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas: Perspectives from the Global South (Lozano Long) Conference at The University of Texas at Austin in February 2020.
Carole Boyce-Davies, Cornell University
Carole Boyce-Davies, a native of Trinidad, is professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Boyce-Davies was the recipient of two major awards in 2017: The Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013); and a bilingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017), in Haitian Kreyol and English. In addition to over one hundred journal essays, articles and encyclopedia entries, Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published twelve critical editions on African, African Diaspora, and Caribbean literature and culture. Her current research and writing is for a contracted manuscript titled “African Women’s Rights: Writing Black Women’s Political Leadership.”
Yomaira Figueroa, Puerto Rico
Yomaira Figueroa is assistant professor of Global Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University. A native of Puerto Rico, she was raised in Hoboken, NJ, and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She earned her PhD and MA degrees in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in English, Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (DC ’07). She works on 20th-century US Latinx Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Hispanic literature and culture, and her current book project, “Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature,” focuses on diasporic and exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Equatoguinean texts in contact. @DrYoFiggy
Bedour Alagraa, Canada / Sudan
Dr. Bedour Alagraa is assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Alagraa received her PhD from the department of Africana Studies at Brown University, and was an Andrew W. Mellon graduate fellow during her time at Brown. She is interested in Black Political Thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s). Alagraa has been published in Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among other journals. She is the co-editor of a volume on Black Political Thought, forthcoming from Pluto Press, and recently completed work on archiving Sylvia Wynter’s literary and academic archive. Alagraa is also co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the Black Critique book series at Pluto Press. Her book manuscript is titled “The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster.”