Journal Articles
SMALL AXE 27, no. 3 | NOV. 2023
“A Caribbean Coast Feeling: On Black Central American Women’s Landscape Portraiture”
This essay explores the visual cultural production of three twentieth-century Black Caribbean Central American women painters: June Beer, Judith Kain, and Iris Abrahams. Specifically, it contextualizes their landscape portraiture against the historical backdrops of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and autonomous struggle in the isthmus.
NACLa report on the americas 55, no. 3 | aug. 2023
“For Afro-Mosquitian LGBT Organizers, Resistance is Survival”
Seen from the Caribbean Coast, Nicaragua’s slide toward authoritarianism compounds a long history of settler colonial violence. Struggles for autonomy actively build a more just future.
FIAR 15, no. 1 | SEP. 2022
“Diasporic Intimacies: Garinagu, Creoles, and the Multiplicity of Black Indigeneities in Caribbean Central America”
This collaborative essay reflects on the multiple, varied, and overlapping iterations of Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous identities along Central America’s Caribbean coast and argues for a regional conception of Black Indigeneity based not on primordial or biological conceptions of Indigenous identity but on a historically contingent process of social and political identification.
CARIBBEAN QUARTERLY 67, no. 4 | DEC. 2021
“Afro-Nicaraguan Diasporas of Sexual Violence and Visual Art as a Space for Healing”
This bio-ethnographic essay takes up the early life history and experiences with sexual violence of my mother, an Afro-Nicaraguan woman from Corn Island, Nicaragua, and considers the possibilities offered by Black women’s visual art as a space for healing.
Book Chapters
black women in latin america and the caribbean | Melanie medeiros and keisha-khan y. perry (EDS.) | Rutgers UP, 2023
“Beyond Intercultural Mestizaje: Toward Black Women’s Studies on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua”
This chapter considers the relationship between intercultural, community based higher education and the production of scholarship on Black women on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. Specifically, I identify key advances and challenges in the study of Black women’s histories, lives, and experiences at The University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN).
Reference Works
Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions’ (AWARE) Dictionary of Women Artists | NOV. 2023
June Beer was a pioneering, self-taught Black feminist painter, poet and revolutionary cultural worker from Bluefields, Nicaragua.