The Departments of Latine Studies, History, African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and KCCDF welcome Melanie Y. White, assistant professor of Afro-Caribbean studies in the Department of Black Studies and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her research explores Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous women’s practices of sovereignty in Caribbean Central America.
More broadly, White's research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminisms; Afro-Caribbean, Central American and Latinx art and literature; digital humanities and archival practices; and familial and personal narratives as frameworks for anticolonial criticism. White earned her Ph.D. in Africana studies from Brown University.
In this talk, White will share insights from her book manuscript, "Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Coloniality and Black and Indigenous Women’s Refusal," which traces four centuries of Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous women's struggles over intimate life on the Miskitu Coast. Drawing on archival research and visual culture analysis, the book reveals how intimate colonial violence has deeply shaped the imperial borderlands of the far western/Central American Caribbean, as well as how Mosquitian women have crafted a vision for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty.