Negras (Spanish and English Edition)

In these pages, the cimarrn cry resonates much more forcefully than any cry of lament. The protagonists actively dissent from their condition as slaves, and, more importantly, from their condition as negras-as an identity constructed by and under eurocentric epistemology. Negras are no longer negras, because only they can know and say who they really are. It doesn't matter whether the slave owners' initials inscribed on their flesh with blazing iron ever disappear, there won't be a way to identify them if they don't have a say. And it's only then that they also stop being "other women." In their self-conception they don't imagine themselves under the categories fabricated by their oppressors, but through their own sense of belonging and vision of the world. No wonder it's "the historians, for leaving us out," to whom Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro dedicates Negras, aware that the stories of Wanwe, Ndizi, Tshanwe, and Petra burst into and fill historical lacunae that have been deliberately ignored.