Faculty of Arts & Science

Visual and Critical Studies

Aggie Frasunkiewicz

“Waking” with María Magdalena Campos-Pons: An Analysis of Campos- Pons’ Memory Work

This research paper examines the works of Campos-Pons that explore themes of collective and ancestral memory, the legacies of slavery, feminism and diasporic identity. Campos-Pons’ works becomes a site/incubator for these explorations and becomes a living testament and direct passage between past, present and future. Christina Sharpe’s theorization of ‘being in the wake’ and ‘wake-work’ provides the necessary scaffolding to analyze select works by Campos-Pons. In The Seven Powers Come by the Sea (1992), Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding) (1994), and Habla La Madre (2014), Campos-Pons enacts ‘being in the wake’ and ‘wake-work’ through memory work, negotiating hybridized identities of the personal and collective diaspora and by reimagining Black futures beyond the legacies of slavery. Key words: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Christina Sharpe, wake-work, diaspora, collective memory, slavery.