The Academy in the Time of Racial Reckoning: Reimagining Freedom from Gulfs between Us

The English Department Intellectual Life Committee invites you to join us for the first part of "The Academy in the Time of Racial Reckoning" series:

Reimagining Freedom from Gulfs between Us:
Collaborative Reckonings, Gulf Shores    

Dolores Flores-Silva & Keith Cartwright

From their initial work on the copresence of Choctaw and Mexican students at a Virginia liberal arts college in the 1870s, to their production of a documentary film on the legacy of the Afro-Mexican maroon leader Yanga, Flores-Silva and Cartwright have focused on the Gulf of Mexico to reimagine literary and cultural frontiers between and within our two nations. This talk will move from discussion of their documentary film (El grito de Yanga / Yanga's Freedom Cry) to challenges that Yanga's legacy raises for racial reckonings in both the United States and Mexico. They will discuss possibilities raised by more collaborative work in the academy, collaborations across disciplines and media of publication, across languages and political boundaries, and with strong community voices across the Gulf. Flores-Silva and Cartwright draw examples from Maya poet/activists in Yucatan to All Saints' Day commemorations in Louisiana, and the writing of Jesmyn Ward.

Dolores Flores-Silva, from the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz, is professor of Latin American literature and culture at Roanoke College. Co-author of The Cross and the Sword in the Works of Rosario Ferré and Mayra Montero (2009), she has written on Mexican and Hispano-Caribbean literatures and cultures, Chicano Studies, and the U.S. South.

Keith Cartwright is chair and professor of English at the University of North Florida and has served as the Fulbright–García Robles U.S. Studies Chair at Universidad de las Américas Puebla. He has published two scholarly monographs and two collections of poetry.

Learn more about the project here: https://gulfsbetweenus.domains.unf.edu/