University of California, San Diego
Graduate Student, Ethnic Studies
Ph.D. Candidate
Thesis Title: Possible Republics: Afro-Latin@ Caribbean Engagements With the “Entanglements” of Race and Nation
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Denise Ferreira da Silva
Ross Frank |
About
Current Project Description:
My dissertation investigates how, from 1875 to 1935, various Puerto Rican and Cuban intellectuals—living in the island as well as in diaspora communities in the US—engaged the ways in which their nations contradictorily included (i.e., nominally) and marginalized racial subalterns like themselves (i.e., economically, politically). I document how these individuals and the social movements they belonged to negotiated these contradictions. I trace how their modes of identifying politically and ontologically oscillated between those centered on national identities to others premised on identifying with other racial subalterns across national boundaries. My goal in writing this is to build on previous examinations of the ways Latin American and Latin Caribbean discourses of nationhood foreclose the presence, agency of, and violence committed against those racialized and gendered as being incapable or undeserving of full national civic, cultural, and social citizenship. I expand on this literature by using a comparative, transnational lens to articulate how some Afro-Latinos/as saw the potential benefits and pitfalls of nationalism and the nation-state as instruments for redressing racism, colonialism, and imperialism. In other words, I show the ways in which as Latin Caribbean national identities became hegemonic, they were challenged by some of those who grappled with the failure of nation-states to deliver their promises of “equality” and “freedom” for all.
Publications:
Fusté, José I. “Containing Bordered ‘Others’ in la Frontera and Gaza: Comparative Lessons on Racialization and State Violence.” American Quarterly, 62:4, 811-819 (December, 2010)
Fusté, José I. “Colonial Laboratories, Irreparable Subjects: The experiment of ‘(B)ordering’ San Juan’s Public Housing Residents” Social Identities, 16:1, 41-59 (January, 2010)
