Dissident Identities

How artists and culture workers mobilize aesthetics, embodiment, and care to reimagine worlds across the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas

This book explores how Afro-queer artists, writers, performers, filmmakers, and activists across the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas use culture as a space of resistance, imagination, and community-building. Bringing together critical analysis alongside creative works of different forms and media, Dissident Identities examines how questions of race, gender, sexuality, embodiment, and belonging are negotiated through visual art, film, performance, music, poetry, and digital media.

Spanning Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and diasporic communities, the book highlights cultural producers whose work challenges dominant narratives about identity while offering new ways of thinking about freedom, care, memory, and social transformation. Contributors analyze topics ranging from Afro-diasporic spirituality and decolonial feminist art to multimodal performance, urban music, and activism through digital visual culture. Together, these chapters reveal how Afro-queer cultural production functions not only as artistic expression but also as a powerful form of political intervention.