We're excited to launch a brown-bag luncheon series to continue building the Latinx Studies community here at NYU. Join us October 15 at noon for the first presentation "Taíno Timbres: Dreaming Afrofutures, Sounding Indigenous Presence in La Sista's 'Anacaona'" by Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes (Faculty Fellow, CAS Music).
This event is open only to NYU faculty, students, and staff. Please use your NYU ID to enter the building on the first floor. The program will take place on the third floor.
Abstract
La Sista's music video for her song "Anacaona" acts as an entry point to recall the often-forgotten history of Boricuas in U.S. Indian Boarding Schools, as well as the implementation of these genocidal assimilationist educational models on the island through U.S. colonial rule. My paper ruminates on how this living history impacts Indigenous modes of sounding, as well as how, in La Sista's case, rap and drums act as modes of language and music revitalization that open portals to the Dreamspace and in effect queer time. Through a decolonial and ancestral listening praxis, I hear La Sista's voice undoing what Maria Lugones calls "the coloniality of gender," ultimately enabling the reggaetónera to engage in resuscitative labor that conjures the Taíno Kasika, Anacaona, in the present moment.
About
Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes is a Boricua writer, educator, and songkeeper. She is currently a Faculty Fellow in the CAS Department of Music at NYU. Her writing and teaching center Indigenous epistemologies of sound and embodiment at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. Her first book project, Sounding Sucia: Disabling Coloniality through Rap & Reggaetón, navigates how queer Indigenous peoples are disabled by coloniality but engage with rap and reggaetón as forms of ancestral memory to disarm coloniality in return.