Refereed Journal Articles
“Gayl Jones’s Afro-Brazil: Hemispheric Black Feminisms and (Mis)Readings of Marronage”
Co-authored with Cassie Osei, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2024, Special Issue on Gayl Jones [Forthcoming]
Abstract
This article considers Gayl Jones’s interventions as a counter-storyteller of Black Brazilian history, focusing on her narrative-poem Song for Anninho (1981) and novel Palmares (2021). Highlighting in each the history of the Palmares quilombo, or maroon community, through the eyes of Almeyda, a Black woman, Jones features marronage as an act of resistance to enslavement as well as a radical Black tradition through which she can critique the white historical canon in the Americas. These questions surrounding Black women's fugitivity put Jones directly in hemispheric conversation with Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994) and Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995), pioneers in Black Brazilian feminist theory. Jones, Gonzalez, and Nascimento understand orality as critical to Black resistance through storytelling, language, and knowledge production. As each offer readings of Black Brazilian history, the misreadings—misrepresentations of Black women by the archive and what Black women purposefully obscure—are potential risks taken to resist archival silences.
Link forthcoming.
From top left, clockwise: author Gayl Jones; her 2021 novel, Palmares; Beatriz Nascimento; “Cite Black Women” in Portuguese; Jones’ book-length poem, Song for Anninho; Lélia Gonzalez; and, artist Rosana Paulino's flag Pretuguês (2022).
“Queer Miscegenation: Freedom, Fluidity, and Failure in Adolfo Caminha's Bom-Crioulo (1895)”
Luso-Brazilian Review, 57, no. 2 (2021): 56-79
Abstract
Nineteenth-century national fictions in Latin America often attempted to quell ethno-racial tensions with allegorical representations of interracial romance. However, Adolfo Caminha’s naturalist novel, Bom-Crioulo (1895), among the first Latin American texts to portray homoeroticism, queers the interraciality of romanticism. By depicting the rise and fall of a relationship between an enslaved Black man impressed into the Brazilian navy and a white cabin boy, Caminha also queers the nation at the peak of immigration campaigns to whiten Brazil. Nonetheless, in the novel’s proto-eugenics perspective on the untenable survival of abject social actors like black people and queers, the protagonists’ signaling toward reprofuturity interrogate utopian dreams of racially achieving nationhood via a queer miscegenation and its imminent failure. The novel functions in favor and against the national project of whitening as it brings queerness and blackness closer in the discourse of Brazilian nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century.
Read the article here.
Cover for the 2019 edition of Caminha's Bom-Crioulo, Todavia Press.
“¡Azúcar!: Celia Cruz and black diasporic feminist interjection”
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 16, no. 1 (2020): 25-46 .
Abstract
The flamboyant performances of Afro-Cuban singer and pan-Latina icon, Celia Cruz, blurred the lines of latinidad and blackness. Where latinidad often ignores blackness beyond its historical contributions to mestizaje, Cruz’s example provides a more complex framework through which to imagine the performative relationship between latinidad, mestizaje, and gendered blackness, especially as it relates to questions of diaspora and belonging for black women. Through close reading, Cruz’s outbursts of ‘¡azúcar!’ (sugar!) underscore the historical contributions of blackness while stretching its everyday possibilities as a black feminist grammar across the diaspora. Understood here as a black diasporic feminist interjection into main- stream Latin music, ¡azúcar! attempts to construct a pleasurable, alternative modernity within and beyond linearity as a repetitive act of black women’s self-insertion.
Read the article here.
Celia Cruz on the red carpet at the Latin Grammy Awards, 2000. Photo credit: Billboard.
Book Reviews
Review of Philip Kaisary's From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press). Slavery & Abolition, 2025. Forthcoming.
Review of Kristie Soares’ Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Latino Studies, 2024.
Cover photo of Rio de Janeiro panorama, ca. 1884. Photo credit: Marc Ferrez, Instituto Moreira Salles.