Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez - Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Hunter College

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, who teaches in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has published extensively in popular and scholarly venues and is the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020) and of the forthcoming The Survival of a People. In this conversation, we discuss the complex geographies of blackness in the Atlantic world, archival work and its relation to Black study, and the expansive historical, literary, and theoretical horizons of Black Studies.