La Negra’s Provocation: Corporeal Consciousness in Nuestra Señora de La Noche by Mayra Santos-Febres

Eloquent Caribbean bodies offer to the global project of decolonization at least three fundamental strategies: an ethic based on the negotiation of forces alternative to dichotomous thinking and the logic of confrontation; the recognition of the role of corporeality in these negotiations; and the focus on embodied experience and knowledge as tools for emancipatory practices. Engaging theories of the body and Caribbean studies with feminist theory, this chapter illustrates what the author has termed “corporeal consciousness” as it emerges in the trajectory of Isabel Luberza, La Negra, whose defiance of the racial, class, and gender restraints enacted by morality in Puerto Rican modern history is fictionalized by Mayra Santos-Febres’ novel Nuestra señora de la noche. Santos-Febres’ revision of the association of black women’s sexuality with “provocation” illuminates the opportunities that claiming epistemological status and ontological recognition to bodily praxis may bring to Inter-American philosophy.