Since 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 Content
Introduction: 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
About the author
This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars in Puerto Rican studies and related fields.
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