Omaris Z Zamora | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (original) (raw)
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Publications by Omaris Z Zamora
Art and Culture Center Hollywood, 2024
Small Axe , 2022
Afro-Peruvian activist and poet Victoria Santa Cruz's 1978 poem "¡Me gritaron negra!" encapsulate... more Afro-Peruvian activist and poet Victoria Santa Cruz's 1978 poem "¡Me gritaron negra!" encapsulates what it is to have "¡Negra!" yelled at you as a five-or seven-year-old child and to learn of your own Blackness through the lenses of others. 1 The poem describes her internalization of White supremacy and reminds us that to be negra is not something you choose but something placed on you, policed, and rejected in you. In a different geographical context to that of Santa Cruz's Peru, as a young girl growing up in Chicago's Humboldt Park community of the 1990s, a mi también me gritaron "¡Negra!" (they yelled "¡Negra!" at me too). This transnational reality of how anti-Blackness moves from Latin America and the Caribbean has always been interesting to me, since many are quick to say that these sociopolitical geographies are completely different. 2 Yet as a Black Latina literary and cultural studies scholar who likes to think of race, gender, and sexuality in movement, I want to take on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro as a sociopolitical
The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 2022
In this essay, I focus on AfroLatina rapper and reality-tv star Belcalis Almanzar, more widely kn... more In this essay, I focus on AfroLatina rapper and reality-tv star Belcalis Almanzar, more widely known as, Cardi B as a figure that embodies the pinnacle of what it is to possess multiple understandings of Blackness (i.e. Caribbean, transnational, diasporic), womanhood, and feminist epistemologies. Cardi B vacillates among subjectivities from stripper to reality-tv star to hip hop artist and political critic. She moves at the intersection of multiple identities—ebbing and flowing in ways that are outside the U.S. social logics of blackness and Latinidad. In this essay, I use “trance” as an afro-diasporic framework to grapple with the fluidity of transnational AfroLatina subjectivities in ways that blur the borders of Blackness, as well as that of Black and Latina feminisms, creating a space for re-articulating Black diasporic subjectivities and self-making—which we might miss otherwise. Trance is an alternative state of consciousness, which may be facilitated in afro-diasporic religions by instruments of hypnosis, movement (dance), and repetition (rhythm or music) among others. We can theorize trance as a frame to analyze AfroLatina women’s embodied archives from which an epistemology is rooted in constant movement, but also in the ways that this centrifugal movement of leaving and coming back pushes their own consciousness and subject formation into a transcendental space where new subjectivities can be formed. In analyzing one of Cardi B’s many social media videos, I argue that through this framework we can see how her AfroLatina feminism is centered in an unapologetic practice of refusal, and rejection of Black and Latinx respectability politics in ways that challenge the boundaries of U.S. hegemonic Blackness and Latinidad.
Black Latinas Know Collective Blog, 2019
Post45, 2020
ike Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo's poetry novel The Poet X, I was always... more ike Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo's poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplinaof getting caught up and revealed as an imposter within the church. I walked the tightrope breaking every sacrament that took me away from my body. As a teenager, I wasn't supposed to masturbate almost every night, called by the flesh and the possibilities it offered. As a college student, I wasn't supposed to smoke weed and I wasn't supposed to hold on to remnants of my Pentecostal youthhood while exploring what it meant to spend time being and feeling my body and recognizing that it had a life of its own. I didn't think I was wearing masksthere were just parts of myself I strategically omitted.
ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis , 2016
I dedicate this project to my ancestors, my mother Lucy Zamora who inspired this project, and my ... more I dedicate this project to my ancestors, my mother Lucy Zamora who inspired this project, and my sister Omandra. I also dedicate this to my future daughter(s) and niece(s) who I hope will find something of themselves in this work.
Dedication I dedicate this body of work to some of the most influential women in my life. Mom, yo... more Dedication I dedicate this body of work to some of the most influential women in my life. Mom, you motivate me to be a warrior and to always keep up the good fight. To my sister, Omandra: I honestly, don't know where my brain and my heart would be if you weren't always there to remind me of who I am and where we are going. To my black sisters who are always sharing words of wisdom and dropping knowledge, continue being who you are.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to remodel or refash- ion how we think about blackness? What does ... more WHAT DOES IT MEAN to remodel or refash- ion how we think about blackness? What does it look like to talk about the African diaspora, but without focusing the discussion on Africa? The 2013 Lozano Long Conference, Refashioning Blackness: Contesting Racism in the Afro-Americas, brought together scholars, activists, educators, and policymakers to revisit how we think about blackness in the Americas, but more speciÀcally, to think about the experience of Afro-descendants in Latin America, the Caribbean, and those who have migrated to the United States. Understanding the African diaspora in the Americas is to convey how blackness as a racial experience can vary depending on the location. As Black Studies scholar Brent Hayes Edwards suggests, diaspora has its moments with which people identify, or not, and recognize similarities as well as diŲerences. When we understand that the African diaspora is composed of similarities and diŲerences, we are also acknowledging that blackness is Áuid.
Book Reviews by Omaris Z Zamora
Papers by Omaris Z Zamora
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint t... more This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a sociopolitical identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the depoliticized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, and the embodied fact of Blackness, the author argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability.
Art and Culture Center Hollywood, 2024
Small Axe , 2022
Afro-Peruvian activist and poet Victoria Santa Cruz's 1978 poem "¡Me gritaron negra!" encapsulate... more Afro-Peruvian activist and poet Victoria Santa Cruz's 1978 poem "¡Me gritaron negra!" encapsulates what it is to have "¡Negra!" yelled at you as a five-or seven-year-old child and to learn of your own Blackness through the lenses of others. 1 The poem describes her internalization of White supremacy and reminds us that to be negra is not something you choose but something placed on you, policed, and rejected in you. In a different geographical context to that of Santa Cruz's Peru, as a young girl growing up in Chicago's Humboldt Park community of the 1990s, a mi también me gritaron "¡Negra!" (they yelled "¡Negra!" at me too). This transnational reality of how anti-Blackness moves from Latin America and the Caribbean has always been interesting to me, since many are quick to say that these sociopolitical geographies are completely different. 2 Yet as a Black Latina literary and cultural studies scholar who likes to think of race, gender, and sexuality in movement, I want to take on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro as a sociopolitical
The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 2022
In this essay, I focus on AfroLatina rapper and reality-tv star Belcalis Almanzar, more widely kn... more In this essay, I focus on AfroLatina rapper and reality-tv star Belcalis Almanzar, more widely known as, Cardi B as a figure that embodies the pinnacle of what it is to possess multiple understandings of Blackness (i.e. Caribbean, transnational, diasporic), womanhood, and feminist epistemologies. Cardi B vacillates among subjectivities from stripper to reality-tv star to hip hop artist and political critic. She moves at the intersection of multiple identities—ebbing and flowing in ways that are outside the U.S. social logics of blackness and Latinidad. In this essay, I use “trance” as an afro-diasporic framework to grapple with the fluidity of transnational AfroLatina subjectivities in ways that blur the borders of Blackness, as well as that of Black and Latina feminisms, creating a space for re-articulating Black diasporic subjectivities and self-making—which we might miss otherwise. Trance is an alternative state of consciousness, which may be facilitated in afro-diasporic religions by instruments of hypnosis, movement (dance), and repetition (rhythm or music) among others. We can theorize trance as a frame to analyze AfroLatina women’s embodied archives from which an epistemology is rooted in constant movement, but also in the ways that this centrifugal movement of leaving and coming back pushes their own consciousness and subject formation into a transcendental space where new subjectivities can be formed. In analyzing one of Cardi B’s many social media videos, I argue that through this framework we can see how her AfroLatina feminism is centered in an unapologetic practice of refusal, and rejection of Black and Latinx respectability politics in ways that challenge the boundaries of U.S. hegemonic Blackness and Latinidad.
Black Latinas Know Collective Blog, 2019
Post45, 2020
ike Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo's poetry novel The Poet X, I was always... more ike Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo's poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplinaof getting caught up and revealed as an imposter within the church. I walked the tightrope breaking every sacrament that took me away from my body. As a teenager, I wasn't supposed to masturbate almost every night, called by the flesh and the possibilities it offered. As a college student, I wasn't supposed to smoke weed and I wasn't supposed to hold on to remnants of my Pentecostal youthhood while exploring what it meant to spend time being and feeling my body and recognizing that it had a life of its own. I didn't think I was wearing masksthere were just parts of myself I strategically omitted.
ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis , 2016
I dedicate this project to my ancestors, my mother Lucy Zamora who inspired this project, and my ... more I dedicate this project to my ancestors, my mother Lucy Zamora who inspired this project, and my sister Omandra. I also dedicate this to my future daughter(s) and niece(s) who I hope will find something of themselves in this work.
Dedication I dedicate this body of work to some of the most influential women in my life. Mom, yo... more Dedication I dedicate this body of work to some of the most influential women in my life. Mom, you motivate me to be a warrior and to always keep up the good fight. To my sister, Omandra: I honestly, don't know where my brain and my heart would be if you weren't always there to remind me of who I am and where we are going. To my black sisters who are always sharing words of wisdom and dropping knowledge, continue being who you are.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to remodel or refash- ion how we think about blackness? What does ... more WHAT DOES IT MEAN to remodel or refash- ion how we think about blackness? What does it look like to talk about the African diaspora, but without focusing the discussion on Africa? The 2013 Lozano Long Conference, Refashioning Blackness: Contesting Racism in the Afro-Americas, brought together scholars, activists, educators, and policymakers to revisit how we think about blackness in the Americas, but more speciÀcally, to think about the experience of Afro-descendants in Latin America, the Caribbean, and those who have migrated to the United States. Understanding the African diaspora in the Americas is to convey how blackness as a racial experience can vary depending on the location. As Black Studies scholar Brent Hayes Edwards suggests, diaspora has its moments with which people identify, or not, and recognize similarities as well as diŲerences. When we understand that the African diaspora is composed of similarities and diŲerences, we are also acknowledging that blackness is Áuid.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint t... more This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a sociopolitical identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the depoliticized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, and the embodied fact of Blackness, the author argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability.
Latinx Talk Mini-Readers offer a curated selection of essays and creative work previously publish... more Latinx Talk Mini-Readers offer a curated selection of essays and creative work previously published on our site and our predecessor site, Mujeres Talk, on specific themes and topics, followed by a set of discussion questions relevant to the readings. We hope these resources contribute to growing knowledge in and of Latinx Studies, expanding dialogues on critical issues, and turning ideas into praxis. These mini-readers are made for classroom and community use. Mujeres Talk published from 2011 to 2017. Latinx Talk has been in publication since 2017.