THURS 10/28: Dr. Sarah Bruno on Bomba, Sound and Black Feminist Affective Abolition
Electrician and LxC Member Dr. Sarah Bruno Speaks at the Race Workshop at Duke
Choreographies of Resistencia: Bomba Puertorriqueña and Black Feminist Affective Abolition
Dr. Sarah Bruno, ACLS Emerging Voices Race and Digital Technologies Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University
Sarah Bruno’s work centers on Blackness in Puerto Rico (and the States) and decolonial practices. She leans into music, dance, information technologies and emotions to animate her ideas of Puerto Ricans living in the hold of colonialism. This talk, based on ethnographic material in Puerto Rico and Chicago, centers bomba as the launchpad from which to map out a history of Black feeling amongst Afro-Puerto Rican women. Bruno pays specific attention to how embodied practices of refusal in bomba’s dance circle, the batey, and how they are lived out through recent moments in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. This porous theorizing can help posture scholars of (de)colonization to understand how we can get free. More than that, by listening to and mirroring Puerto Rican history in relation to bomba, Bruno is (re)membering Black genealogies and geographies that colonialism has tried to silence and thinks through an articulation of resistencia and abolition.