My forthcoming book, Maroon Underflows: Underground Poetics in Puerto Rican Diasporas explores the concept of marronage beyond its historical usage as a form of resistance against empire and coloniality, focusing specifically on Puerto Rican poets in the US and the Afro-Atlantic. Marronage emerges as an underground cultural practice where Black Diasporican poets and artists assert their identities and heritage in spaces that may otherwise marginalize them. It is a vibrant affirmation of Black culture, values, and a lineage of resistance. The study examines how these Diasporican writers and artists resisted colonialism, institutional neglect, racism, and cultural subjugation through intermedial poetic practices and the establishment of alternative maroon spaces. Maroon Underflows argues that Puerto Rican poetry in the US functions as a metaphorical underflow, replenishing Afro-Puerto Rican-Latinx groundwaters: futures and serving as an experimental maroon laboratory of underground writing in and beyond the page. I see it as a dissenting Black archive within the US literary landscape.
Maroon Underflows engages in the analysis of interconnected texts created by Afro-Puerto Rican-Caribbean artists since the 1960s. These texts encompass various disciplines such as filmed performances, audiovisual arts, text-based graffiti, audio and video recordings, dance, and music translations of blackness and the Afro-Atlantic. These works I analyze challenge linguistic, disciplinary, and imperial boundaries while proposing maroon epistemologies and poetics. This fugitive praxis empowers Black communities to resist, create, and flourish in the face of historical and contemporary systemic challenges.
Dr. Rojo Robles 