Geographies of resistance and the re-existence: archives of female fugitivity - Dr Ana Laura Zavala Guillen

Come along to hear Ana present her work describing the geographies of resistance and re-existence in Latin America.

Ana has worked with Maroon-descendant communities —the descendants of fugitives from slavery— to critically understand the contested production of their territories as resistance, their social movements and transnational activist networks, feminist practices of territorial care and intimacy, and the Black epistemologies on which they are all founded.

Multidisciplinary artists Karen Antunez, Mary Porto Casas, Yully Da Chaga, and historical geographer Ana Laura Zavala Guillen founded the collective Sankofa-Améfrica Marrona in 2023. The collective's work draws from the African epistemology of Sankofa- go back to the past to get lessons for a better future- and the practice of marronage in the context of the Afro-Indigenous-Brown Latin America—Améfrica Marrona.

From these lenses, the collective has focused on analysing colonial records that contain stories of women runaways, whose search for freedom entangled borders and territories in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, just as the artists' ancestors did during the 18th and 19th centuries. As a result, the collective proposes the visceral exercise of archival marronage, which involves acknowledging the contents of the archive and taking what valuable elements are to step away from its distorting gaze to reclaim history and agency. Sankofa-Améfrica Marrona proposes building affective archives of female fugitivity in the artistic shapes of murals, paintings, and performances. These archives do not aim to fill gaps in their countries' white and white-Mestizo hegemonic history, but to propose new interpretations of the spatial resistance practice of past and present marronage based on family and personal histories of resistance.

About the speaker

Ana is a Latin-American historical geographer researching in and with Afro-descendant communities about their geographies of resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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This event has been organised by the Yorkshire and North East committee.