Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures; Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Affiliated Faculty, Department of Comparative Literature
About
Research and Teaching
My research and teaching interests converge at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. With a background in Comparative Literature, I specialize in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and culture. Other areas of expertise include Marxism and psychoanalysis; critical, literary, postcolonial, and translation theory; francophone Caribbean and continental European philosophy; and Black and Indigenous Studies.
My first book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020), sheds light on a persistent but often latent division in Frantz Fanon's writings, a subtle internal struggle between two modes of thinking about change. I argue that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive theory of transformation. To develop this argument, I offer a close and symptomatic reading of Fanon's entire oeuvre, from cannonical texts like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands.
Subterranean Fanon was selected as an Editor's Pick for the journal EuropeNow, it was featured in a podcast with the New Books Network, and it was the focus of events sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.
My next book, Translating Universality: Marxism and Indigenous Radicalisms in Latin America, explores past and present (missed) encounters between Marxist and indigenous worldviews and practices. Key figures for this study include José Carlos Mariátegui, José María Arguedas, Álvaro García Linera, Raquel Gutiérrez, Fernanda Navarro, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Subcomandante Marcos.
I am the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Universality and Translation: Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics (with Katie Chenoweth, Fordham University Press) and Between Revolution and Democracy: José Aricó, Marxism, and Latin America (with Susana Draper, Brill’s Historical Materialism Book Series). I am also the translator of Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, The Infinite Farewell (Duke University Press, 2018).
I am Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. I also lead the Marxism Lab, which produces collaborative research on the history and actuality of Marxist theory and practice.
I have received fellowships in support of my research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UM’s University Musical Society, and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. I have served on the Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association’s Forum on Marxism, Literature, and Society (2017-2022) and as the faculty mentor of the Marxisms Collective (2016-2023).
Selected Publications
Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
"The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator: Approaching Marxism as/in/with Translation from Antonio Gramsci to the Zapatistas," Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory 30, No. 1 (February 2022): 99-132.
"Latin American Marxisms: Reading José Carlos Mariátegui and José Aricó Today," Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, No. 3 (January 2021): 1-11.
"Una teoría materialista de las ideas viajeras: José Carlos Mariátegui y el socialismo indo-americano," Boletín del Grupo de Trabajo: Herencias y perspectivas del marxismo. El Ejercicio del pensar 1, No. 5 (October/November 2020): 53-61.
"The Missed Encounter of Turupukllay: Marxism, Indigenous Communities, and Andean Culture in Yawar fiesta," Radical Americas 5, No. 1 (2020): 1-16.
"Remembering the Sixties: On Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Time," Modern Language Notes: Spanish Issue 134, No. 2 (March 2019): 360-381.
"Repeating Translation, Left and Right (and Left Again): Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses and Distant Star," CR: The New Centennial Review 17, No. 3 (Winter 2017): 237-263.
"Hacia una teoría de la práctica teórica: Mariátegui, marxismo y traducción," Escrituras Americanas 2, No. 2 (December 2017): 43-80.
"José Aricó como lector de Gramsci," co-authored with Susana Draper and Ana Sabau, Gramsci en las orillas, ed. Oscar Ariel Cabezas (Buenos Aires: La Cebra, 2015), 141-170.
"Masters without Slaves: Raoul Vaneigem’s Détournement of Nietzsche," Global Anarchisms: No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries, eds. Barry Maxwell and Raymond Craib (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2015), 283-315.
"The Idea(s) of Occupy," Theory & Event 15, No. 2 (June 2012).
"Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces: The Translation of Politics and the Politics of Translation," Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21, No. 1 (March 2012): 87-102.
"Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière," conducted with Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry 38, No. 2 (Winter 2012): 289 -297.
