Diasporic Aesthetics in the Poetry of Nancy Morejón, Conceição Evaristo, and Mary Grueso Romero

Abstract

This article presents part of a postdoctoral research project dedicated to investigating a specific aesthetic in Afro–Latin American poetry written by Black women, referred to as Diasporic Aesthetics. Grounded in Afro–Latin American Studies and in concepts such as Amefricanidade, post-memory, and escrevivência, the analysis focuses on selected poems by Nancy Morejón (Cuba), Conceição Evaristo (Brazil), and Mary Grueso Romero (Colombia). The so-called Diasporic Aesthetics is understood here as a set of poetic procedures that revisit Africa as a symbolic reference, anchoring themselves in the collective memory of enslavement and in the transatlantic experience as a cultural route constitutive of Black identities in the Americas. By bringing these three authors into dialogue, the article seeks to demonstrate that the poets under analysis, from within their respective national contexts and personal trajectories, reconfigure the past of African enslavement and the African diaspora in Améfrica, retracing the cultural routes imposed by these historical processes and transforming them into an aesthetic expression that emerges as a tool of resistance and reexistence in the present. Thus, Diasporic Aesthetics is consolidated as a practice of reaffirming Blackness, reconfiguring history, and combating racism through the literary word.