Karrieann Soto Vega

Karrieann Soto Vega is an assistant professor of cultural rhetoric in the Department of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Soto Vega’s research and teaching spans Puerto Rican and Latinx studies, decolonial feminism, anticolonial activism and social movements, performance, and sonic rhetoric. Her book manuscript, Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation is forthcoming with Ohio State University Press. Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation: traces a rhetorical history of Lolita Lebrón—a Puerto Rican woman revolutionary—to craft a social movement theory around “rhetorics of defiance” against empire and colonialism. Connecting Lebrón’s genealogy as a Puerto Rican nationalist/Third World woman, attending to divergent representations of her as terrorist and freedom fighter, and extending Lebrón’s story to contemporary struggles against colonial debt, the book argues that rhetorics of defiance have the capacity to endure as long as oppressive structures impact colonized communities.