The Vital Poetics of Zora Neale Hurston and Luisa Moreno: Settler Extraction and Florida’s Black Women Conifer Workers

This talk will discuss how Black women workers created forms of resistance and survival in Florida’s extractive conifer industry during the Jim Crow Era. It will center the voices and experiences of Black women workers by juxtaposing archival materials with the ethnographic and literary works of Zora Neale Hurston and the poetic work of Guatemalan labor activist Luisa Moreno. Doing so shows how Black women conifer workers weaves their life-creative labor with ecological knowledge to form a theory of vital poetics- a practice of woman-led sociality and fugitivity that countered regimes of ecological extraction and Black unfreedom. Click here for more information! 

Date: December 5, 2018
Time: 10 am
Location: Humanities Gateway, 3341

Dr. Salvador Zarate received his Ph.D. from UC San Diego Ethnic Studies. He is currently Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies.