Cultural Rhetorician Karrieann Soto Vega to Deliver English Department's 2024 Elbow Symposium on Oct. 16
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DiaspoRican feminista and cultural rhetorician Karrieann Soto Vega will deliver a talk on "Decolonial Feminist Rhetoric Across Oceanic Borderspaces: Puerto Rican Challenges to Empire" Wednesday, Oct. 16, from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in South College E470. The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of the English Department's 2024 Elbow Symposium public lecture.
This presentation expands decolonial perspectives against empire by focusing on episodes from the SoVerano Boricua, the mass protest movement denouncing corruption in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2019. The creative social movement rhetoric included visual, sonic, and performative modalities, including perreo combativo—wherein a group of people embodying diverse gender and sexual identities danced a raunchy form of reggaetón together. Puerto Ricans from the diaspora joined those living in the archipelago, in both digital and public spheres, highlighting the complexity of longstanding colonial conditions that led to the protests that summer in relation to the significance of local politics and beyond. By tracing Puerto Rican challenges to US empire across oceanic borderspaces and associating them to other sites of struggle like Hawai’i and Guahan, this talk explores how we can better understand how colonial capitalism, militarism, and neoliberal governance are contested by those most impacted.
Soto Vega is a DiaspoRican feminista and cultural rhetorician. Her research and teaching spans Puerto Rican and Latinx studies, anticolonial feminism, activism and social movements, performance, and sonic rhetoric. She has received a fellowship from CENTRO: Center for Puerto Rican Studies research project, Rooted + Relational, focusing on the theme of "Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico." Her collaborative efforts also garnered a "Right to the Discipline" grant from the Antipode Foundation.
Soto Vega's book manuscript, tentatively titled Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation is under advanced contract with the Intersectional Rhetorics book series of The Ohio State University Press. Based on her dissertation research, which won the Association for the History of Rhetoric's Dissertation Award in 2018, Rhetorics of Defiance is a feminist rhetorical history of Lolita Lebrón—a twentieth century Puerto Rican nationalist, her anti-imperial prison writing, and her relentless coalitional activism, as it reverberates into contemporary struggles.
Some of her other work can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; the Journal for the History of Rhetoric; and CENTRO: Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies.