My research.

The impossible attracts me as a scholar and educator for the same reason it attracts many Afrofuturist theorists and writers. For only courageous thinking at the limits of the possible will show us the ways to creating a world capable of nurturing and sustaining life. I search for this kind of thinking in and beyond the archives of our pasts. Recognizing the ways in which historical actors refused to accept the limitations of the possible grounds my new and future historical research. I am profoundly interested in how Afro-diasporans across time have attempted not only to change or dislodge unjust circumstances or systems, but to question the boundaries of what is possible, and, in so doing, challenge the theoretical and epistemological foundations of “the possible” in their time.

My first book, Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC, 2017), opened the way for my early explorations of the impossible. The book examines the lives and experiences of a diverse group of Cuban refugees who fled colonial Cuba to Mexico during the 19th-c independence wars. I argue that rather than dream of a new Cuba within hermetically sealed communities, Cubans in Mexico allowed their future visioning to be shaped by the solidarities they formed in exile. At the same time, Mexicans fighting against authoritarianism reimagined Mexico by dreaming Cuba libre. Both Cubans and Mexicans reached for the impossible as they envisioned decolonized nations in which democracy, equality and “progress” could truly coexist.

My current book project, “Impossible Futures: African World-Making in Late 19th-century and Early 20th-century Cuba” shifts from considering the experiences of external refugees to those of the internally displaced within Cuba. In 1902, a group of self-identified Africans petitioned the United States government for protection from Cuban state authorities who were forcing them to naturalize as Cuban citizens. Cuba had recently thrown off the yoke of Spanish colonialism only to fall under US control when the United States launched a military occupation of the island in 1898.  In 1902, the United States relinquished formal power and the Cuban republic was born. But some African residents of Cuba did not see incorporation into the new Cuban republic as the best option for securing their freedom and prosperity.

My current Historical research centers the worldmaking practices of African-identified intellectuals in early 20th-century Cuba who resisted and refused democratic national citizenship. Thinking at and beyond the limits of the possible, they staked claims to rights, dignity and equality in a world that denied their full humanity. 

I suggest that the unique demands made by African-identified people in Cuba must be read as Afrofuturist articulations of another possible world, one very different from that which came to pass. The freedom dreaming of self-identified Africans in Cuba should inspire us to rethink modern narratives that too easily equate progress with freedom, and freedom with progress. What we stand to gain are different perspectives on our past and on our possible futures.  Please read my most recent article on this project here.