Dean of the College, Division of Languages and Literature, Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures (FLCL), and Spanish Studies Presents

Remapping the Caribbean: Firelei Báez’s Cartographies of Resistance and Fugitivity

In the Western imagination, the Caribbean has often been configured as a feminized landscape—its territories likened to a woman’s body that is sexually available for conquest and exploitation. Similarly, Black and Indigenous Caribbean women’s bodies have been historically configured as sites of extraction, subjected to colonial fantasies of production and reproduction. Focusing on the island of Hispaniola as a case study, this talk traces the role of Western travel narratives, illustrated maps, and nationalist cultural production in shaping these racialized and gendered spatial tropes. Through literary and visual analysis, Familia considers a genealogy of Western-masculine narratives that have shaped enduring colonial visions of the Caribbean, from the writings of Christopher Columbus and the cartographic work of Henry Popple to the literary texts of Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi. She then situates the work of contemporary Dominican visual artist Firelei Báez as a powerful counter-narrative, arguing that Báez’s series of map paintings strategically reckon with the violence of these historical archives, while illuminating the spatial strategies Caribbean women and femmes have employed to disrupt this colonial geographical imagination.

Yafrainy Familia is a PhD candidate in Spanish and an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She specializes in contemporary Caribbean literature and visual culture from a comparative perspective across the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbeans. Her research focuses on Caribbean women writers and artists and engages feminist, decolonial, and digital humanities methods. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, and UVA’s Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, among others. She is also a Solidarity Fellow in the Mellon-funded digital humanities project Diaspora Solidarities Lab, which supports solidarity work in Black and ethnic studies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; The Acentos Review; and the exhibition catalogue of Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People. 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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