University of California, San Diego
Faculty Member, Ethnic Studies
About
Drawing from my training in Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies in Canada, Comparative Ethnic Studies and Chicana/o Studies in the United States and significant time and research in Mexico - each country with very different state definitions of Indigenous peoples and rights - I take a hemispheric approach to understanding questions of race and Indigeneity.
My research emphasizes the material, social and epistemic conditions produced by the colonization of the Americas, the entrenchment of the Atlantic slave trade, and the new terms in which knowledge was produced and disseminated: the mechanically reproduced book. In the book manuscript I am currently completing, tentatively titled Imagined Continents: Sexuality, Colonialism and Print Capital, I examine the possibilities and limits facilitated by the new book market and key texts produced in the early colonial period for their role in the constitution of “the myth of continents.” Specifically, I conduct the first English analysis of an important collection of so-called discovery letters, Paesi Nouamente Retrovati (1507), alongside archival collections of woodcut images representing the Americas from sixteenth-century print, and investigate the politics of publishing books on and from “Africa” and “the Americas” in the early colonial period. I argue that an examination of these texts underscores the importance of understanding the construction of Indigeneity in the Americas in relation to other racial categories and the role of sexuality in historically constituting the concept of race. The final section of my book manuscript examines the articulation of geo-political difference in early colonial Nahuatl print culture so as to give an account of subject formation during a time in which colonial relations became the regulatory norm. The intent of this project is to illuminate the colonial divide in early print culture and discourses of sexuality in the formation of modern racial and epistemic schemas.
My teaching interests focus on the colonization of the Americas in the context of the broader Atlantic, Indigenous politics in Mexico, the US and Canada, as well as introductory, survey and methods courses in Cultural Studies, Women's/Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies.
