On Feb. 10-11, 2011, Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, editors of The Afro-Latin Reader: History and Culture in the United States, Duke University Press (2010), will be the King-Chávez-Parks (KCP) Visiting Scholars during the celebration of Black History Month at Wayne State University, in collaboration with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation (DHDC).
Their various lectures on the theme of their visit, "Black, Latin-Both!," are sponsored by the WSU Department of Africana Studies, Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies, WSU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the KCP Foundation in the WSU Graduate School, in collaboration with the Wright Museum, DHDC, WSU Humanities Center, WSU Academy of Scholars and WSU Department of English.
On Thursday, Feb. 10, there will be an informal reception at 2 p.m. on the WSU campus, in the Faculty Administration Building, room 3337.
At 6 p.m., on the same day, Román and Flores will present: "Black, Latin-Both!" The discussion on their groundbreaking book, The Afro-Latin Reader, will be held at the Wright Museum, 311 E. Warren in Detroit.
At noon on Friday, Feb. 11, Román will talk about their book with students enrolled in the Another Chance GED Project at DHDC, 1211 Trumbull in Southwest Detroit.
Friday at 3 p.m., the pair will facilitate "Expanding the American Literary Cannon," a workshop during which the two will discuss how to incorporate Afro-Latino literature into the American literary canon. The dialogue takes place in the WSU Department of English, 5057 Woodward Ave, 10th floor conference room.
Also, on Feb. 11 at 5:30 p.m., Román and Flores will join Afro-Latino, African American and Latino writers from the Detroit metro area in a roundtable discussion on writing. Poetry, prose, spoken word performances as well as music provided by the band Bomba Rica will be the highlight of the evening. Some of the local writers participating in the event include Lolita Hernández, Esperanza Cintrón, Lena Cintrón, Rayfield Waller, Ethriam Brammer, Melba Joyce Boyd, and young poets from the Inside Out Literary Arts Project. This event will also take place at the DHDC, 1211 Trumbull. Refreshments will be served.
Román is executive director of afrolatin@ forum, a research and resource center focusing on Black Latin@s in the United States. For more than a decade, she has researched and curated socio-historical exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she also served as the assistant director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program. She was managing editor and editor of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has taught courses on race, ethnicity and gender in Latin America and the Caribbean at Binghamton, Brown and Columbia universities. A frequent speaker/lecturer and consultant on African American and Latin@ issues, her essays on diasporic racial formations and inter-ethnic relations have appeared in a number of scholarly publications. She is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center.
Flores is professor of Latino Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His research interests focus on social and cultural theory, Latino and Puerto Rican studies, popular music, theory of diaspora, transnational communities and Afro-Latino culture. Flores is the author of numerous books, including Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (1993), From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000), and The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (2009). He is the translator of Memoirs of Bernardo Vega (1984) and Cortijo's Wake (2004). He was awarded the Cuba's Casa de las Américas Prize in 1979 for a widely read essay on Puerto Rican studies and in 2009 for his book Bugalú y otros guisos: ensayos sobre culturas latinas en Estados Unidos. In 2009, he was honored with the Latino Legacy Award of the Smithsonian Institution.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call the Department of Africana Studies at (313) 577-2321 or the Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies at (313) 577-4378.
Wayne State University is a premier urban research institution offering more than 400 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 32,000 students.