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Kiley Guyton Acosta
UC Santa Barbara
Kiley Guyton Acosta is a cultural curator, performer, and professor of
Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her unique
undergraduate seminars, including Afro-Cuba and Afro-Latin@s in the United
States: Creating Identity on the Color Line, bring critical attention to
the often invizibilized history, culture, identity politics, and lived
experiences of Afro-descendants in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the
U.S. Kiley holds an M.A. in Hispanic literature and a PhD in Spanish and
Portuguese from the University of New Mexico and is the recipient of
fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, Title
IV FLAS, and the University of California. She has been recognized for her
innovative methods of integrating academics, art, and activism into
engaged research, teaching, and community outreach.
Currently, Kiley is working together with Afro-Cuban folkloric performance
groups and community activists in Havana on a post-doctoral project
entitled, "Rumba Epistemology from Guaguancó to Hip-Hop: Performing Ethos,
Memory, Community, and Resistance in Afro-Cuban Folkculture". In May 2014,
she had the honor of joining forces with an inspiring cohort of Cuban
scholars, artists, poets, filmmakers, and activists as the bilingual
interpreter for Afro-Cuban Voices (2014), a
groundbreaking symposium organized by Pedro Pérez Sarduy with Casa de las
Américas. The program united the island's foremost experts on Afro-Cuban
history and culture to discuss their work in dialogic exchange with
international colleagues. The principal objective of Afro-Cuban Voices is
to bring critical attention to the resurgence of anti-black racism in the
context of the drastic socio-economic changes occurring in post-special
period revolutionary Cuba, and to further advance the collective efforts
of Cuban citizens and the state to address race-based issues and establish
anti-racism policies.
As a member of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial team for
Colombia: the Nature of Culture (2011), Kiley served as cultural
interpreter and bilingual presenter for artisans and musical groups of
Colombia's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Her ethnographic work on
Afro-Latina identity has been incorporated in the Smithsonian Latino
Center's Latino DC History Project ("The Cuban Presence in DC" 2011), and
she has collaborated on the PBS series Black in Latin America as a
research consultant ("Mexico and Peru: The Black Grandmother in the
Closet"). Her provocative writing on Cuban underground hip-hop,
Dominican-American diaspora literature, and Brazilian cinema has been
published in peer-reviewed journals including Ciberletras, Brújula, Jenda:
A Journal of Culture and African Women's Studies, and Palgrave Macmillan's
Latino Studies. With an insatiable passion for the arts, Kiley is also a
dedicated student of dance and percussion, and enjoys performing with the
California-based Afro-Brazilian dance company Bahia Magia.
Azúcar negra: (Re)Envisioning Race, Representation and Resistance in the Afrofeminista Imaginary, PhD thesis, 6/13
Kiley develops the transnational theory of "Hemispheric Feminism" as an
intersectional perspective that maps de-colonial New World feminism(s)
from the position of black and brown women in former slave societies
throughout the Americas. In her dissertation Azúcar negra: (Re)Envisioning
Race, Representation and Resistance in the AfrofeministaImaginary, she
locates contemporary theorizations of black feminisms (afrofeminismos) by
Latina women of African descent in Cuba, Brazil and Dominican diaspora
communities of the U.S. Specifically, she examines how Afro-Latina
subjects theorize afrofeminismo and memorialize their experiences through
creative expression including poetry and prose, hip-hop music, visual
displays of the body, and digital media. Her research contextualizes the
evolution of (mis)representations of Afro-descendent women, looking
closely at how black and brown female bodies are scripted and
(re)inscribed over time. The main objective of Azúcar negra is to shed
light on the manifold ways contemporary cultural products respond to
historic (mis)representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the
mulata (mulatto woman) in the post-colonial cultural imaginary. Drawing
from a critical evolutionary overview of black feminist thought, she
argues that in the digital age, afrofeminista epistemology becomes a
conduit for recovering historically invisibilized voices from the margins,
resisting dominant narratives of race and gender representation, and
(re)envisioning what it means to be black and Latina in the New
Millennium. Overall, this study ruptures and re-maps existing discursive
boundaries to create an aperture for the theorization of black feminism as
transnational and diasporic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INRODUCTION
...................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1 INSCRIPTIONS OF RACIAL (MIS)REPRESENTATION: THE BLACK FEMALE
BODY IN HISPANIC CARIBBEAN AND BRAZILIAN LITERATURE
...........................................................................................................17
CHAPTER 2 TRANSNATIONAL DIALOGUES: THEORIZING AFROFEMINISMO, FROM THE
BLACK FEMINIST MOVEMENT TO THE BIRTH OF HIP-HOP
.....................................68
CHAPTER 3 RAPPING RACE AND RESISTANCE: A BREAKDOWN OF THE CUBAN
UNDERGROUND HIP-HOP MOVEMENT
..........................................................................................................111
CHAPTER 4 AFRO-CUBAN COUNTERPOINT: BLACKNESS AND BLANQUEAMIENTO IN THE
HIP-HOP FEMINIST IMAGINARY
...........................................................................................................161
CHAPTER 5 BLACK LIKE US: NEGOTIATING RACE, REPRESENTATION, AND RESISTANCE
IN THE DOMINICAN DIASPORA OF THE UNITED STATES
............................................................................................219
CONCLUSION
..................................................................................291
REFERENCES ...................
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