Cafecito con Rocio Zambrana

April 8th, 2022
4:00 PM EST
Virtual Event

Join us for a Cafecito con Rocio Zambrana on April 8th, 2022 at 4 PM EST. Professor Rocio Zambrana will be in conversation with Dr. Raquel Salaz Rivera in presenting her new book Colonial Debts. Colonial Debts explores neoliberal coloniality out of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and the ways in which debt functions as a way of using race, gender, and class to strengthen colonial ties between Puerto Rico and the U.S. Tune in for the conversation, and be sure to bring your burning questions for a Q&A after the discussion!

Bios

Rocio Zambrana’s work examines critiques of capitalism and coloniality in various philosophical traditions, especially Marxism, Decolonial Thought, and Feminisms of the Américas (Latinx, Latin American, Caribbean). Her current work explores coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism, considering the articulation and deployment of race/gender as crucial to the development and resilience of capitalism. Zambrana considers the manifestations of coloniality in a colonial context by examining fiscally distressed Puerto Rico. She is the author of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021) and Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), in addition to articles, book chapters, and columns on related themes. She is Co-Editor, with Bonnie Mann, Erin McKenna, and Camisha Russell, of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy; series Co-Editor, with María del Rosario Acosta, of the forthcoming Constelaciones de filosofía feminista (Herder); and has been a columnist for 80grados (San Juan, Puerto Rico). From Mayagüez, PR, Zambrana holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico, Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory.

Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the New Voices Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, the Laureate Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship to translate the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, which have been longlisted and shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen America Open Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award. His sixth book, antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022), is an imaginative leap into Puerto Rico’s decolonial future. In 2022, he will participate in no existe mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first scholarly exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art to be organized by a large U.S. museum in nearly half a century, whose title borrows a verse his fourth poetry book while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Puerto Rico. With a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, he serves as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PRLP), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.