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finally read Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s Decolonizing Diasporas; I’m experimenting with in-book annotations to see if that will help me actually read the academic books I have again without feeling like I have to be sitting at my computer to transcribe passages constantly. it worked pretty well with this one, I think!
unfortunately, the book itself was a bit disappointing. some of the concepts are cool, and I really appreciate the broader disciplinary intervention — the juxtaposition of Equatoguinean literature with Afro-Latinx literature from the Caribbean and the Dominican, Puerto Rican, and (as an afterthought) Cuban diasporas. the overall argument, though, just didn’t do it for me, mainly because it turns almost entirely away from material politics while nonetheless insisting that it’s doing material work.
it wouldn’t have bothered me as much, I think, if it had just accepted that it was working entirely at the level of culture / ideology / superstructure — there’s a place and a value for that. but to juxtapose, e.g., a critique of reparations that are focused on quantifiable material reparations (land, money) in favor of a “reparation of the imagination” with, of all things, Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor” suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of Tuck and Yang’s argument and the stakes of what decolonization means, and it made me doubt the whole project. in the effort to bridge together Black feminism, feminismo de(s)colonial, the Mignolo-Quijano-etc. coloniality school, and North American Indigenous theorists of decolonization — an admirable goal, to be clear! — I think it ended up taking up only somewhat limited / superficial aspects of each of them. perhaps Tuck and Yang are correct about incommensurability (although I still don’t think what they’re describing is, striclty, absolute incommensurability).
the close readings were probably the strongest part, although some of them felt more descriptive than analytical — but that may just be because I’m already inclined to read, for example, Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La bastarda in much the same way Figueroa-Vásquez does.
third of all, it should be immediately obvious that the problem with the political program of “crack-up capitalists” — variously neoliberals, libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists — isn’t “secession” in and of itself, but rather the fact that they want to secede specifically and explicitly in order to a) vastly expand human misery around the world through unfettered capitalism; b) violently impose a white supremacist fantasy of total racial segregation and, through the unfettered capitalism, absolute white economic and political dominance over non-white people; and c) ideally recreate aristocracies of “elites” who are “worthy” to rule over these new polities.
all told, I think the concept here is great — the juxtapositions of texts work really well, and I think she’s totally correct that there’s a lot to be gained by reading these texts together and by centering these bodies of Afro-Hispanic literature. I just don’t think the execution succeeded, much though I wanted it to.
(it’s just occurred to me that possibly the issue is precisely that she recognizes that literature cannot directly contribute to material decolonization, but instead of circumscribing her reading to account for this she ends up simply ignoring material(ist) politics, and the result is an overprivileging of literature — a classic literary scholar move.)