Ana-Maurine Lara
Personal Information
Description
Ana-Maurine Lara is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. Her areas of interest include Afro Latino/a identities, black queer aesthetics, Vudú in the Dominican Republic, and Afro-Dominicanidad and the struggle against xenophobia in the Dominican Republic. Also an award-winning novelist and poet, Dr. Lara spent 10 years as a writer and performance artist before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Her short stories and poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. In addition, she has written and performed many plays and performance art pieces, most recently Landlines (2015), a performance project based in Eugene, Oregon, and The Hope Chorus (2015), a performance piece for which the MRG Foundation selected her as their 2015 Lilla Jewel Artist and which took place at the Justice Within Reach symposium at the Portland Art Museum. At the Dominican Library Dr. Lara researched the role of Dominican women artists in New York City’s socio-political landscape, as well as their contributions to civic and political activism. Dr. Lara’s project will be the one of the few scholarly works to provide concrete historical research on a body of knowledge that has heretofore been anecdotal: how the work of Dominican women artists and activists has risen to the occasion to represent, contest, and provide multiple languages for Dominican dreams, struggles, and visions for social change in New York City in the mid-20th century.
Books
Kohnjehr Woman
"Ana Lara's KOHNJEHR WOMAN Evokes a world such as only narrative poetry can. In a series of concise, orally grounded and visually vivid poems, she introduces the mysterious avenger, Shee, who upends daily life, and all the lives, on an antebellum plantation. KOHNJEHR WOMAN's spell endures." —John Keene
Streetwalking
Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic is an exploration of the ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer persons exercise power in a Catholic Hispanic heteropatriarchal nation-state, namely the Dominican Republic. Lara presents the specific strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in their struggle for subjectivity, recognition, and rights. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, film and video, and interviews, LGBTQ community leaders teach readers about streetwalking, confrontación, flipping the script, cuentos, and the use of strategic universalisms in the exercise of power and agency. Rooted in Maria Lugones's theorization of streetwalker strategies and Audre Lorde's theorization of silence and action, this text re-imagines the exercise and locus of power in examples provided by the living, thriving LGBTQ community of the Dominican Republic.
Queer Freedom
Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization.Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental question: How can we enable queer: black life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be free: sovereign in the twenty-first century? Calling on the reader to join her in exploring possible answers, Lara maintains that the analogy between these terms--queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty--is necessarily incomplete and unresolved, to be determined only by ongoing processes of embodied, relational knowledge production. Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty thus follows figures such as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Mark Rifkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde in working to theorize a potential roadmap to decolonization.
Furious Flower
"Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?"--Back cover.