Future is Now

Vanessa K. Valdés, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at The City College of New York of the City University of New York. A graduate of Yale University and Vanderbilt University, her research is centered on portraits of race, gender, and class in literatures of the Americas. She is also the editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys of the African Diaspora (SUNY Press, 2012).

“This edited volume brings into play differences based on generation, gender, sexual orientation, religious practice, ethnic-racial mixture, languages, and nationalities. Consequently, these studies blur simplistic notions of racial understandings by illuminating distinctive ways in which blackness is defined, contested, and negotiated in a wide range of contexts. . . . The Future Is Now represents a significant contribution to the field not only because it evokes some of these larger issues and questions, but also because it reminds students and scholars that no one region, group, or discipline has a monopoly on the meaning(s) of blackness or ‘black art.’”– Christopher Dennis, Black Diaspora Review 3:2 (Winter 2012/13), 18-22“The merit of The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies is that it takes scholars out of the traditional academic straightjacket, by focusing on more than one discipline, more than one geographic location, and more than one linguistic group. The volume takes a welcome holistic approach to the African diasporic experience.”– Flore Zéphir, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Missouri; Acting Director, Afro-Romance Institute for Languages and Literatures of the African Diaspora“[The Future is Now] will make a valuable contribution to the dialogue on the current thinking and on the future direction of African Diaspora Studies. Regarding the essays themselves, they are thought-provoking, well-researched, and quite appropriate for demonstrating how one pays ‘homage to one’s ancestors’ . . .”– James J. Davis, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Howard University“Dealing with the African Diaspora in the Americas, the essays here are significant in that they expand this important subject beyond its all too common focus on the culture of the United States alone and discuss it in the context of Latin America as well. In an age of unprecedented electronic communication between the peoples of the Americas, the implementation of this kind of hemispheric perspective is both refreshing and productive.”– Earl E. Fitz, PhD, Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University"The compiled essays, which adopt various theoretical and methodological approaches, underscore the diversity of the field and constitute a notable effort to broaden readers’ knowledge of the cultural production of people of African descent from various parts of the Americas and Europe... [The volume] shows that dialogue across national, disciplinary, and linguistic lines is not only necessary, but also possible."– Sobeira Latorre, Associate Professor of Spanish, Southern Connecticut State University; Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 12: 2 (2015)