Book Manuscript In-Progress
Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Colonial Violence and Afro-Indigenous Women's Refusal, 17th Century-Present
Sovereign Mosquitia traces a genealogy of Afro-Indigenous (Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous) women’s intimate anticolonial refusal on the Miskitu Coast. This centuries-long mode of relationality has entailed the embodied practices, aesthetics, epistemologies, and affects of intimate sovereignty they have enacted with and among each other in the face of multiple regimes of racialized and gendered colonial violence. Through close readings of the Mosquitian colonial archive and the contemporary counter-archives of Afro-Mosquitian women artists, this project reveals how Afro-Mosquitian women have imagined and instantiated alternative modes of being and relation with intimate sovereignty at their center.
Digital Humanities Projects
The Black Central Americas Project
The Black Central Americas (BCA) Project is a digital public humanities initiative established in 2023 by my colleague Dr. Nicole D. Ramsey and me, with a core mission of exploring and advancing the rich tapestry of Black Central American history, culture, and scholarship. The project is designed to provide a transdisciplinary and transnational platform to foster discourse and host innovative programming in the burgeoning field of Black Central American Studies. Through a Black feminist and community-collaborative framework, the BCA Project embraces the inherently digital and ephemeral nature of Black Central American diasporic culture and knowledge production and centers themes of migration, movement, and creative place-making amidst centuries of displacement. Stay tuned for our website launch in Fall 2024!
Recuerdos de Nicaragua is a digital humanities project and archival collection focused on the histories and material cultures of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities of the Nicaraguan and Honduran Mosquitia, also known as the Mosquito Coast. Inaugurated in 2018, the project consists of a digital Instagram archive and a physical collection, which houses over twenty-five objects including ephemera, books, photographs, and textiles. Our advisory committee is comprised of Jasmine Chavez Helm, Founder and Head Archivist; Melanie White, Research and Content Associate; Andy Zalkin, Digital Archive Associate; and Leo Madriz, Video/Audio Specialist.
Our work was featured in a three-part interview in the online magazine Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies in 2022. Read Parts 1-3 here, here, and here.