Description
Book SynopsisSince 2007, Afro-Puerto Rican women have been revising the foundational myths of the island and the diaspora to create a new vision of family as a national allegory that includes powerful Black protagonists. Novelists Mayra Santos-Febres and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa tell the diaspora’s history, beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery. Santos-Febres’s allegories use sadomasochism and healing in the novels Fe en disfraz and La amante de Gardel. Short story writers Arroyo Pizarro’s las Negras and Yvonne Denis-Rosario’s Capá prieto chronicle the struggle to create and preserve an empowering history of slavery and Black people on the island and in the diaspora. Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone envisages a sugar plantation in which Afrodescendants are free and respected. They remake the ‘great Puerto Rican family’ to give greater agency to Afro-Puerto Ricans and include the diaspora in a ‘fractal family’. While liberating, these novels also depict the traumas wrought by both the maintenance and the dissolution of patriarchal, heteronormative, colonial and racist structures.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Fractal Families Chapter One: Becoming Family: Mayra Santos Febres’s Fe en disfraz and La amante de Gardel Chapter Two: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro: Cimarronas, Love and Breaking the Silence Chapter Three: Yvonne Denis-Rosario: Fathers, Mothers, Fractals and Writing Chapter Four: Oshun and the Palenque-Plantation in Daughters of the Stone Conclusion: Afro-Borinquén Today and Tomorrow Appendix: Author Interviews Notes Glossary of Terms Works Cited
