Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, with interests in Latinx, Caribbean, and decolonial art and media studies. Over the course of her career, Negrón-Muntaner has produced influential work in many forms: films, essays, stories, monographs, reports, and the founding of organizations. Her latest project, Valor y Cambio (Value and Change), puts into action affective art against neoliberal policies in Puerto Rico, legally a territory of the United States, and beyond. Although many understand art as a form of revolt, Negrón-Muntaner demonstrates that political change also requires intersecting critical and artistic praxes to create “joyful” spaces that nurture demands for just economies, value community resources, and provide people with trusted platforms for dissent. “I do think that there is a certain joy that we could call ‘decolonial,’” Negrón-Muntaner notes. “This joy is necessarily collective and emerges from the particular suffering and pain of coloniality.” More generally, all of Negrón-Muntaner’s work facilitates routes of institutional escape, post-disciplinarity, and poetic acts of political disruption.
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https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-frances-negron-muntaner-on-puerto-rico-art-and-decolonial-joy/
