Research
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean LiteratureCambridge University Press | 2022
The Dual Biopolitics in the Cuban Postplantation of Gloria Rolando’s Raíces de mi corazónSmall Axe | 2021
Achy Obejas’ The Tower of the Antilles and a literary life in retrospectLatino Studies | 2020
Atlantic Continuities in Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anayain The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies | 2019
El corpus poético de un ‘Caribe nerudiano’: Consideraciones racial-históricas y transatlánticas de Canto general a Canción de gestaAfro-Hispanic Review | 2019
Junot DíazOxford Bibliographies | 2018
A Planetary Warning?: A Multilayered Caribbean Zombie in Junot Díaz’s “Monstro”in Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination | 2016
An Inclusive “Black Atlantic”: Revisiting Historical Creole FormationsLatin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies | 2015
Los ideales políticos-sociales de Michel-Rolph Trouillot y sus aportes crítico-históricos a la literaturaJournal of Haitian Studies | 2013
Recent Classes Taught
What is the real meaning of “the zombie” in Junot Díaz’s short story and why do we think of it as the ‘walking dead’? What might Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism look like in Angola? Or how does a Chicano poem dialogue with the removal of white imperialist monuments? How are memory sites in fiction and UNESCO memorials in Africa related? How are Latinx and Latin American writers haunted by African liberation wars of the 20th century?
Departing from the definitions of coloniality and postcoloniality this course reads the literary and cultural experiences of those impacted by modernity in all of its manifestations: economic, political, epistemic, racial, sexual, and in terms of gender. Because independence movements, slavery’s abolition, and revolutions did not extinguish what Aníbal Quijano terms “the coloniality of power,” we will also engage with the “Decolonial”—a school of thought emerging mostly from Latin America—as it attempts to reveal colonial influences undergirding subaltern practice. This course will thus seek to read diverse cultural representations (film, music, poetry, the short story, the novel) of a 20th and 21st century Americas and West Africa, through the lens of the decolonial. Main decolonial critics we will engage in: Mignolo, Jacqui Alexander, Lugones, Mbembe, Ngugi, Mudimbe, José David Saldívar, Emma Pérez, and Chela Sandoval.
This comparative and interdisciplinary course challenges students to question the functionality of memorials and memorialization in the Global South. Students confront the relationship between memory and narrative and their role in addressing the trauma of colonization, the Slave Trade, and decolonization wars within Latino, Latin American and West African literature. Often pairing the readings with prominent UNESCO-sponsored memorials or other landmarks, this course endeavors to have students question how a transnational Americas remembers itself, against the odds of imperialist, neoliberalist, and heteronormative hegemonies, and includes discussions on the Cuban revolution, the Cold war, the Nicaraguan civil war, the decolonizing wars in the Congo and Angola, and the explosion of neoliberalism, while engaging in different styles of writing that include magical realism, the uncanny, sci-fi, and the speculative, from renowned voices such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, Achy Obejas, Camara Laye, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel García Márquez, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and director Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer).
Talks (Selection)
Select Invited Talks
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature.
Invited by Aisha Beliso-De Jesus
Effron Center for the Study of America, Princeton University, April 3, 2023
Intersections of Nation, Race, and Gender: Recent Work on Hispanic Caribbean Cultures
Invited by Jorge Duany
Florida International University, March 10, 2023
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
Invited by Alejandro de la Fuente. Respondent: Doris Sommer
Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Harvard University, March 3, 2023
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
The XXV International Colloquium on Mexican Literature, invited by Sara Poot Herrera
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara, November 11, 2022
Archival Rehabilitation in Tomás Rivera
Tomás Rivera Archives; invited by Richard T. Rodríguez
University of California, Riverside, November 7, 2022
Reconstruction in Nostalgia: Latin(x) American Narratives of African Decolonization
Invited by the Marie-Curie REWIRE project “Disappointment: Reclaiming the Unfulfilled Promise of Resistance”
Universität Wien, May 4, 2022
Frantz Fanon, Sixty Years After
Invited by the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Duke University, December 3, 2021
Tomás Rivera’s Site of Memory and the British Scramble for the Congo
Invited by the Arts and the Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, the United Kingdom, October 20, 2021
On Roberto Fernández Retamar and the Mambí
Presentation for Course “Crossing the Atlantic: Race and Identity in the African Diaspora”
Stanford University, February 8, 2021
Gabriel García Márquez and the Cold War in Angola
Post45 Symposium
University of Notre Dame, September 20-21, 2019
Achy Obejas’ Havana
Colloquium “La ville et ces discours/The city and its discourses.” Invited by Prof. Daniel Desormeaux, Professor of French, Romance Languages Department
University of Chicago, April 25-26, 2019
The Decolonial Turn: Visiting Literature, Reading Memorials of the Atlantic
The Decolonial Collaborative Research Group, Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford University, March 7, 2019
Reading Space, Visiting Texts: Theorizing a Latin/o African Tourism in Caribbean Literature
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan, February 6, 2017, Ann Arbor, MI
Theorizing Heritage Tourism: Approaches to Transatlantic Textual Memory
Leslie Center for the Humanities
Dartmouth College, February 12, 2016, Hanover, NH
Memorializing Metaphor: A Transatlantic Archeology of Latino Ruins
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University, December 3, 2015, New York, NY
Conferences (past 5 years)
Panelist
The Black Internationalist Nostalgia of ‘el 68’ in María Luisa Puga and Sami Tchak for Latin America and the Global Cultural Imagination Panel (Ignacio Sánchez Prado, chair), with Erin Graff Zivin, and Patricia Stuelke
Modern Languages Association (MLA), January 5-8, 2023, San Francisco, CA
Chair
Tribute to Betita Martínez panel and Archival Theory of the Global South in Latinidad panel
American Studies Association (ASA), November 2-6, 2022, New Orleans, LA
Chair and Panelist
Atlantic Latinidades: Spiritual and Political Sites of Engagement
Latino Studies Association (LSA), July 15-18, 2022. South Bend, IN
Chair
Retrospective Latinx Studies: A Look Back at the Discipline in the Age of Covid-19
Latin American Studies Association (LASA), May 13-16, 2022. San Francisco, CA
Chair and Panelist
Archival Theory of the Global South in “Latinidad”
Modern Languages Association (MLA), January 6-9, 2022. Washington, D.C.
A Latin-Africa Reciprocity: Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s UNESCO Slave Route and Latino Writing in the Global South
The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
October 27-30, 2021. Virtual
Reading Trails, Visiting Texts: Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s UNESCO Slave Route and Latino Writing in the Global South
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
April 8-11, 2021. Virtual
Chair and Panelist
Atlantic Latinidades: Memory Sites of Transatlantic Crossings in U.S. Latina/o/x Caribbean Cultural Production
Latino Studies Association (LSA)
July 15-18, 2020. (CANCELLED due to the coronavirus pandemic)
Chair and Discussant
Thinking Latinidad Beyond the U.S.
Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
May 13-16, 2020. Guadalajara, MEXICO (CANCELLED due to the coronavirus pandemic)
Chair
Retrospective Latinx Studies: A Look Back at the Discipline
Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
May 13-16, 2020. Guadalajara, MEXICO (CANCELLED due to the coronavirus pandemic)
Re-Membering Ourselves: Afro-Atlantic Praxes of Memory, Pleasure, and the Sacred
Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
May 24-27, 2019. Boston, MA
Mess, Excess, and the Pleasures of Latinx Creativity
Latinx Seminar, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
March 7-10, 2019. Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
New Diasporas: A Roundtable
Modern Languages Association (MLA)
January 11, 2019. Chicago, IL
Media
Interviews and Podcasts
Une Conversation Avec Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) and the Center for French and Francophone Studies both at Duke University
April 29, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_DZDTrR5Kw&ab_channel=DukeFranklinHumanitiesInstitute
Derecho, Historia y Cultura—La herencia africana de la literatura latina y caribeña
Potencia UMA—Podcast de la Universidad Marista
March 30, 2022
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/potencia-uma/derecho-historia-y-cultura-QWDhqAYdgO9/
Boubacar Boris Diop and Murambi, the Book of Bones
Latin-Africa and the Global South Seminar
March 17, 2022
Meet our New Faculty: Sarah Quesada Ph.D.
Duke Department of Romance Studies
October 21, 2021
https://romancestudies.duke.edu/news/meet-our-new-faculty-sarah-quesada-phd
Editorial
I currently serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, published by Duke University Press
Meridians, an interdisciplinary feminist journal, provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in US and international contexts.
About
I am Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. My main interests are literatures of the Global South, specifically Latinx, Latin American and African literatures. I work at the intersection of Atlantic world studies, African diaspora studies, and World Literature.
My comparative focus is also devoted to archival and fieldwork research. I have spent time in France and its départements d’outre mer, specifically in French Guiana, as well as Brazil, Benin, Senegal, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. My research has involved “Human Subject” interviews mainly along the UNESCO Slave Route in Africa, and colonial archive consultation across the Atlantic World.
Before joining Duke, I was an assistant professor of English and Latinx studies at the University of Notre Dame, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an Andrew Mellon ACLS fellow.
