The concept of black affect draw from the idea that blackness involves particular experiences which affect black people world view or the nature of their struggles and feelings. These experiences include the need of recognizing and encouraging self-love, spirituality, ancestral roots, self-identity and resistance against of centuries racism, among others. Since these are not particular experiences but communal, black affect is an idea that connect black people's outlook, stories and narratives.
Scholars as Lisa M. Corrigan and Tyrone Palmer have studied the topic of race and affect as socio-political issues with effects on racial justice, because of the potential impact that hate or love have over the racialized bodies of Black women in the diaspora. However, the writer bell hooks had explained the importance of self-acceptance and love for the black community as part of the initiatives to gain empowering. This is also implicit in Frantz Fanon work, as well as that of Aimé Cesaire and other Pan-African-Diasporic thinkers.
In fact, the concept of malungaje coined by professor Jerome Branche to refer to "as a sort of first principle for the discursive imaginary of the diaspora, or as a broad (counterdiscursive) foundational trope for black cultural identity politics and political action. A key component of this idea is its linkage with slave ship resistance culture and the subsequent liberatory impulse of maroonage". In that sense, black affect and malungaje constitute contemporary strategies of maroonage used by scholars, philosophers, writers, activists and leaders to unit black communities with the purpose of proposing their own narration of their own history, providing a new perspective of the Africans contribution to the world.
Therefore, Karyn Mota will start with the definition of a hemispheric decolonial Black feminist approach to symbolic reparations for the legacy of slavery and structural racism through contemporary Afro-Latin American and Caribbean narratives, ultimately with the purpose of analyzing how and why Black subjects experience different forms of oppression, as well as to interrogate and recognize strategies of resistance and liberation proposed by Black subjects. Acts of resistance are what render possible the process of re-humanization of diasporic people. This, considering that literature can re-humanize Black people by denouncing the oppression they endured as part of a matrix of domination and by forging resistance through acts of agency and developing a sense of an affirmative future. Based on a comparative approach under the concept of “amefricanidade,” coined by the Brazilian scholar Lélia Gonzalez.
On the other hand, Jamie Lee Andreson will analyze how as leaders of Afro-Brazilian religion based in oral traditions, Black Candomblé priestesses are the keepers of ancestral knowledge in their communities. She will analyze the literary works of three Candomblé Priestesses: Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, Mãe Beata de Iemanjá, and Mãe Valnizia de Ayrá with an attention to orality and intertextuality. Through these works, the priestesses have cut out a long tradition of primarily white intermediaries in the process of representation and dissemination about Candomblé. This will contribute to the discussion about how living and narrating spirituality becomes an act of resistance, connected to the love for their identity and blackness as one of the most noticeable acts of maroonage or malungaje for African people in Latin America.
Moreover, Renata Pontes will present her reading of the acclaimed novel Sirena Selena Vestida de Pena (2000) by Mayra Santos-Febres, where she will analyze how exploring this spirituality in the fiction can constitute a bridge with a historical archive that speaks of queer women’s of color realities and subjectivities from a trans-Caribbean perspective impacting on a collective memory and an affective narration in the construction of histories-otherwise told by communal subjects who share existences with human and non-human beings.
Finally, Jeanne Rosine Abomo will analyze the re-semantization of the experience of Afro-Peruvians in the novel Malambo by Lucía Charún-Illescas, which deconstructs the myth of an indigenized or blanqueada peruanidad. The critical dialogue between testimonial novel and the theoretical proposals of Quince Duncan and the thinking of activist and feminist Lélia Gonzalez aims to schematize the process of rehumanization of the Afroperuvian population.
In closing, I will offer a brief discussion about how the panel, itself, becomes at the same time a prime example of malungaje in order to suggest new perspectives regarding the effect of such a liberating concept as an expresion of joy for Black communities in the diaspora.