Hidden Knowledges and Diasporic Positionings: The Autobiographical and Testimonial Texts in Metamba Miago: relatos y saberes de mujeres afroespañolas

Abstract

This article deals with hidden knowledges and diasporic positionings in Metamba Miago: relatos y saberes de mujeres afroespañolas, a crowdfunded collection edited by Deborah Ekoka Hernandis and United Minds. The collection consists of autobiographical and testimonial texts by Afrodescendant women in Spain, texts that emanate from personal experience but extend beyond the biographical to a collective level. My analysis shows how these texts articulate shared Afrodiasporic knowledges of what it means to be the racialized Other. They discuss how to cope with this experience, how to deal with this specific in-betweenness of belonging to Spain “differently” and how to re-evaluate Afrodescendance as an affirmative space of affiliation. Using theoretical approaches that conceptualize literature as an archive of hidden and marginalized knowledges, I elaborate on how the texts in Metamba Miago imagine Afrodescendance not just as political resistance to a predominant regime of White supremacy but as an empowering narrative, a narrative that goes beyond defining Blackness in relation to racism and creates new frames of reference and positively connotated spaces of identification for Afrodiasporic subjects. Studying the texts’ argumentative structure and their framings through the profile pages, the analysis focuses specifically on the authors’ self-positionings, often illuminated through self-designations that locate the Afrodescendant subject in a dynamic diasporic space where new self-determined narratives of belonging arise. Furthermore, it illuminates a growing self-awareness articulated in the texts that allows the authors and their readers to resist inferiorization and, instead, celebrate who they are.