Research

Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption.

By Ruth Enid Zambrana, professor and interim chair of women’s studies, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

"Toxic Ivory Towers," seeks to document the professional work experiences of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in U.S. higher education, and simultaneously address the social and economic inequalities in their life course trajectory. Ruth Enid Zambrana finds that despite the changing demographics of the nation, the percentages of Black and Hispanic faculty have increased only slightly, while the percentages obtaining tenure and earning promotion to full professor have remained relatively stagnant. Toxic Ivory Towers is the first book to take a look at the institutional factors impacting the ability of URM faculty to be successful at their jobs, and to flourish in academia. The book captures not only how various dimensions of identity inequality are expressed in the academy and how these social statuses influence the health and well-being of URM faculty, but also how institutional policies and practices can be used to transform the culture of an institution to increase rates of retention and promotion so URM faculty can thrive.  

"Suspect Freedoms" chronicles more than a hundred years of Cuban diasporic history in New York. One of the few studies to examine the early history of Afro-Cuban migration and politics, it employs a rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to produce what Michel Rolph Trouillot calls an "unthinkable history."

In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called the government of species. The book explores efforts to control the spread of Hansen's disease, venereal disease, polio, smallpox, and HIV through interventions linking the continental United States to Hawai'i, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Congo, Iraq, and India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ahuja argues that racial fears of contagion helped to produce public optimism concerning state uses of pharmaceuticals, medical experimentation, military intervention, and incarceration to regulate the immune capacities of the body. In the process, the security state made the biological structures of human and animal populations into sites of struggle in the politics of empire, unleashing new patient activisms and forms of resistance to medical and military authority across the increasingly global sphere of U.S. influence.

Humanitarian Violence considers U.S. militarism—humanitarian militarism—during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia. Neda Atanasoski reveals a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics, identifying a discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the targets of U.S. disciplining violence.

Contemporary urban spaces are critical sites of resistance for black women. By focusing on the spatial aspects of political resistance of black women in Newark, this book provides new ways of understanding the complex dynamics and innovative political practices within major American cities.

In this 2012 paper, Dr. Sydney Lewis explores the complexities of black femme identity and black femme-ininity as a lens of literary critique

This book uses the Anglophone Caribbean as its site of critique to explore two important questions within development studies. First, to what extent has the United Nations' call to implement gender-mainstreaming projects resulted in the realization of gender equity for women within developing societies? Second, does gender-mainstreaming have the conceptual, operational, and technical capacities to address the centrality of the body in 21st-century lobbies for gender equity? In answering these questions, Rowley examines such issues as reproductive rights and equity, sexual harassment, and sexual minorities' rights.

At the 2010 Polish Association of American Studies Conference in Łódź (American Diversity: Identities, Narratives, Politics) Elsa Barkley Brown gave a keynote lecturetitled “Narratives of Identity and Citizenship: Reading the Black Female Bodyacross the Twentieth Century.” William Glass and Agnieszka Graff interviewed her on 27 October 2010 in Warsaw.

Against the backdrop of the industrial growth of Bombay, Codes of Misconduct examines the relationship between lawmaking, law enforcement, and sexual commerce. Ashwini Tambe challenges linear readings of how laws create effects and demonstrates that the regulation and criminalization of prostitution were not contrasting approaches to prostitution but different modes of state coercion.