Beatriz Llenín Figueroa’s Afecto, archivo, archipiélago: las vidas soberanas y caribeñas de Puerto Rico (Editora Educación Emergente, 2024 & 2025) was launched on November 5, 2025, at the 1st Río Piedras International Book Fair [Feria Internacional del Libro de Río Piedras (FIL RÍO 2025)]. Translated by the author, this book was first published as Affect, Archive, Archipelago: Puerto Rico’s Sovereign Caribbean Lives (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022). This new edition is an important contribution to the Spanish-language archive of analytical writings on decolonization and representation in the Caribbean.
Description: Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s and Marta Aponte Alsina’s critical-creative work, this book explores how Puerto Rico’s affective archive of Caribbean relations, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic, the sea, and Caribbean regionalism. The book’s transdisciplinary archive includes historical figures and their legacies; political and activist thought, textuality, and action as performative interventions; and performance and live arts pieces, objects, materialities, and texts as political/activist actions.
Affect, Archive, Archipelago begins by delving into the historical-political figures of Ramón Emeterio Betances, Luisa Capetillo, and Pedro Albizu Campos. It then encounters the work of the live arts collective Agua, Sol y Sereno; the political/activist work of Amigxs del MAR, Comuna Caribe, Mujeres que Abrazan la Mar, and Coalición 8M; and Teresa Hernández’s transdisciplinary artistic trajectory. Finally, stemming from the book’s argument and the immediate historical-political-affective context of Puerto Rico’s summer 2019 rebellion (Verano Boricua), the book offers some reflections and proposals for furthering decolonial, sovereign, archipelagic, and reparatory horizons for Puerto Rico.
Beatriz Llenín Figueroa is a writer, editor, and translator. She holds a PhD in literature from Duke University. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM). Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Caribbean literature and philosophy, Caribbean studies, maritime history, island and archipelagic thought, and critical theory. She is also interested in independent theater and works as an editor for Editora Educación Emergente. Her work revolves around the Puerto Rican and Caribbean archipelagos, their ecopoetics and embodiments, and experimental theatre and performance.
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Also see https://www.amazon.com/Affect-Archive-Archipelago-Sovereign-Rethinking-1