Research

"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.

The United States is known as a "melting pot" yet this mix tends to be volatile and contributes to a long history of oppression, racism, and bigotry.

Emerging Intersections, an anthology of ten previously unpublished essays, looks at the problems of inequality and oppression from new angles and promotes intersectionality as an interpretive tool that can be utilized to better understand the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference shape our lives today. The book showcases innovative contributions that expand our understanding of how inequality affects people of color, demonstrates the ways public policies reinforce existing systems of inequality, and shows how research and teaching using an intersectional perspective compels scholars to become agents of change within institutions. By offering practical applications for using intersectional knowledge, Emerging Intersections will help bring us one step closer to achieving positive institutional change and social justice.