Hypatia vol. X, no. X (XXX 2015) © by Hypatia, Inc.
THE DIVERSITY PRIZE ESSAY
Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial
Readings of Shadows of Your Black Memory
and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
YOMAIRA C. FIGUEROA
This article considers Mar ıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure
to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For
Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the
grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of
institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and
other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and resis-
tance. I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical ele-
ment of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels
in the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo’s Shadows of Your Black
Memory and Junot D ıaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings,
the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender
violence inherent to coloniality.
Hey, World—here I am ... I’m here, and I want recognition, whatever
that mudder-fuckin word means.
—Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.
—Junot D ıaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
RECOGNIZING A DEMAND
Piri Thomas’s groundbreaking book Down These Mean Streets offers a glimpse into the
life of an Afro-Puerto Rican man coming of age from the 1930s to the 1960s (Tho-
mas 1967). Peppered with fast “gutter language” and predicated on contentions with