Projects

The Projects below focus primarily on my research. They are intrinsically in dialogue with my commitment to teaching and to equity in higher education. Please use the links below to navigate to my current manuscript project, articles, and galleries, as well as an overview of my doctoral work and public speaking engagements.

Manuscript

The book takes a comparative approach to U.S. and Latin Amrican shared asymmetric histories of imperial colonial land governance. While in my dissertation the primary question was about the effects of official and unofficial pacification policies in territorial enclosures across both geographies as a catalyst for storytelling that encompasses both a literary and a historical past, the book’s central question does not seek to reveal or highlight occluded pacification phenomena at the root of storytelling behavior. Rather, the central question in the book is more concerned with the failure to heal one’s relationship with the pacified past by knowing it, this failure then becoming manifested as purposeful distortions in the mimetic representation of the historical record as a kernel for the depiction haunted archives in modern and contemporary storytelling.

Continuing form my dissertation’s archival and theoretical work, the comparative lens of the book continues to work with literary and audiovisual recreations of the need to resolve the impact of 18th century epistemologies of territorial control in contemporary novels and art. While, in my dissertation, I read primary historical documents as a form of raw literary output when it serves to fill a gap in the relationship between the present and the past, in the manuscript, those primary sources work in tandem with weird and speculative contemporary fiction and art that uses “history” as a central  component of narrative or plot experimentations, revealing a more complex semiological picture of unresolved business with the colonial era. These recreations are now inserted in a discussion of the paradigms of representation that threaten to spiral into a captive, and yes, toxic relationship with the interplay of knowing/ not knowing the past, but that can, one hopes, function in a healthier, if imperfect manner.

As I publish new articles aimed at testing out the scope of my readings and the way I engage multiple fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as my insistence on hybrid periodizations, patterns that emerge include:

  • The polycentric nature of weird diasporic Latin American literature and American Literature when it is concerned with the way land administration in colonial times operated on the cultural fabric of sometimes natural and sometimes supernatural characterizations of the haunting past.
  • The role of translation of contemporary literature, archival finding aids, and colonial sources in shaping shared aesthetics of  anachronistic experiments in literary representations of the past
  • The fraught relationship between the accessibility of raw historical data and the sense of freedom to not know the past while still stewarding it in the present.

Some characteristics of the manuscript, though no longer as center-stage as I might have envisioned in 2022, remain paramount to the contextualization of historical sources in the book: how contemporary art and literature in the U.S. and Brazil engage the memory of 18th century territorial disputes in colonial transimperial borders, which remains a crucial question in the material history of literature and ita cultural circulation.

In one aspect of the book, the work is in fact a direct continuation of archival work in my dissertation, and is where several of my conference oresentstions in 2025 have focused: the interplay between Brazil and the American Midwest as a feature of Cold War developments in the archival world of raw historical data. In the book, I’ll offer an intervention on how the Brazilian 18thc century materials in the book made their way to the U.S., especially the Midwest, examining their role in shaping how contemporary re-readings of this history in literary and artistic renditions encapsulate a modern reflection of the relationship between consciousness and land in intertwining plots and narratological patterns of American and Latin American literature.

Articles

I have recently published one article based on my dissertation research, and I have one upcoming article engaging key concepts from my manuscript-in-progress:

Article 1 (Published): ‘‘715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back’: The Archival Question of Art Resistance for Abolitionist Futures in a Pacified Present.” Journal for Cultural Research, 2023. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14797585.2023.2238142

This article discusses my work with Michigan archives in the 70s and Marielle Franco’s legacy both as a thinker and as the subject of public art where her likeness is displayed in large, often colorful murals and other forms of visual art. Putting her lifework in conversation with the formative stories and objects from the archives of the birth of the department of African American and African Studies at the University of Michigan allows us to operate with and question the inter-generational work of North and Latin American solidarity in re-dressing material historical injustices in the productions of literary, historical, and political cultures since the colonial era.

Article 2:

The Albuquerque Papers in Motion: The Afterlives of Maroon Storytelling in Tereza de Benguela’s Archival Journey to the American Midwest. Forthcoming.

The central question for this article is a simple one: What is the influence of geographic and temporal dislocations associated with the account of the attack of Quilombo Grande in the border of Brazil and Bolivia in the 18th century now that this source resides in a public-facing institution in the American Midwest? This historical source was produced in 18th century Brazil, was later shipped overseas to Western Europe, and eventually was purchased out of the world of private booksellers by a public-facing Midwestern institution in the 20th century. What is not so simple about this question is that we can’t read these geographical and temporal dislocations in a vacuum when we assess the influence of this source in modern literature and art. What exactly is one trying to understand when a modern Brazilian-American researcher earnestly unpacks the urge to interpret the story in the best possible way? What kind of reading of ourselves in the present, Brazilians and Americans, can we responsibly present when we must take the train to Chicago to find out what happened at the margins of the Guapore River in a land dispute in 1770? The article articulates a narratological, aesthetic, and translation studies answer to this simple/ not so simple question, elaborating in the process, a need to contemplate one of the central questions in my manuscript-in-progress: at what point–and at what cost–in the answering of this question, does contested land history truly become storytelling, literature and art?

Doctoral Work and Dissertation

My doctoral dissertation is called Sovereign Noise in Times of Peace: An Abolitionist Transimperial Cultural History of Pacification in the U.S. and Latin America.

In the Introduction, I offer a theoretical overview of how scholars in history, sociology, and cultural studies have studied pacification, i.e., how it works, what it does, and who benefits from it. Then I ask the question: How do we engage the record of pacification as we attempt to reform contemporary injustices in social forms of policing?

In Chapter 1 I introduce the concept of using the contemporary concepts of “femicide” and “fake news” to read the stories of displacement and attempted genocide in the map of pacified policing. I read the Federal investigations of fake news accusations made against high administrators of the Brazilian government in the wake of the assassination of anti-pacificaiton activist and elected official Marielle Franco in 2018. Then I use the discussion of these terms to read the mediation of the murder of an Indigenous woman recently investigated by the Truth Commission in Brazil. I close the chapter by posing that the analysis of how these terms function when we dislocate them chronologically within modernity sets up the re-hearing of older stories of territorial displacement in the making of the nation-state and how social antagonisms are built into territorial disputes that lead to the fault-lines of pacification in the present.

In Chapter 2, I contrast a neoliberal critique of Rio de Janeiro’s pacification with the cultural historical question of how we understand the record of displacement of Indigenous and marooned (quilombo) people from land that was accessioned into the burgeoning nation-state project in the 18th century. I read the 18th century Anal de Vila Bela de 1770 where we find the record of the displacement of Tereza de Benguela’s Quilombo (marooned community), celebrated by slain public official and anti- pacification activist Marielle Franco’s use of Benguela’s name in commemorating the history of internal migrant Black women’s leadership in the making of the Brazilian nation-state.

In Chapter 3, I engage the official record of the formation of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (illegal settlements in urban and rural settings in Brazil, juggling a precarious relationship with the official government and insurgent self-governance since the 19th century, with the largest, oldest, and most organized favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro being home to more than 1.5 million people). I contrast how Latin Americanist and Brazilianist scholars have problematized the prevailing attitude towards favelas as a contemporary phenomenon of urban, modernizing poverty. I align my cultural- historical reading with this intervention, which seeks to understand favelas as co- constitutive with the creation of urban modernity. I show how this existing understanding of favela history is itself in agreement with the communities having origins in the pacified Brazilian 19th century, and as such, I converge this historical intervention with my study of the word and with the existing bibliography of 19th century Brazilian pacification. I close read the proliferation of settler-colonial “whiteness,” where the social death of the colonizer is articulated as a proliferation of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous territorial control in the composition of the Anal de Vila Bela de 1734. I then ask how we have fared in harkening the illegal settlements and sovereign enclosures inside the internationally recognized borders of the modern nation-state. Through my theoretical intervention, I pose that understanding the role of such “enclosures” inside the “enclosure” of the formation of the nation-state is not a problem for our contemporary world order or a threat to international peace, but the only substantive path to acknowledging the porous nature of peaceful borders.

Chapter 4

In Chapter 4, my extended conclusion, I take on the concept of peace in the critical study of pacification by setting up the future question of the manuscript length version of this dissertation: If peace and militarization have been perhaps irrevocably interlinked, then what constitutes non-violent policing, and what constitutes a peaceful national or regional border in the present? In my current research, since defending the dissertation in 2022, I am engaging the moment of Abolition in the American 19th century, and the half century that followed and preceded it, and the moment of proliferation of the word pacification in Brazil (18th-19th century). As a launching point of the manuscript research, which envisions a fuller global transimperial critique of the effects of pacification policies on the world, the question of the viability of peace in an unjust society begins to take shape in the concluding chapter of the dissertation. In this final chapter, I engage the Art Archives of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. This archive is greatly composed of student and faculty activism against the policing of Black and ally spaces in the making of the contemporary University. Engaging a selection of sources from my work with the DAAS Art Archives, I articulate the concept of art as a peaceful, but not necessarily non-violent “shield and mirror” for Black Indigenous, illegal, immigrant, queer, and poor people’s contestation of the settler-colonial mentality that can so often dictates how university towns and campuses are administered in the United States and the world.

Public Galleries

Manuscript Gallery Work:

The International Repository of Pacification

While I work on my next manuscript, I am also compiling and interpreting stories, sources, and objects for an interactive digital gallery. The basic premise of the website is that land settlement records from the Southern Cone of Latin America and the North American frontier can be put into dialogue with literary sources and travel writers traveling between the two regions to form databases that allow visitors to follow stories of people as they travel along the continent, either factually or literarily. The project has its origin as an interactive element of my working manuscript’s primary sources, but I intend for it to grow into a crowd-sourced repository of primary sources and artistic narratives of the global phenomenon of pacification.

This is a cultural history map project outlining the limits and possibilities of peace in the global history of the word “pacification.” The word has been used since the 16th century to denote attempted elimination and displacement by standing armies designated as keepers of the peace. These stories and sources will help inaugurate the International Repository of Pacification web exhibit. The gallery spaces hosted in it will be curated in light of the labor of peace as a contemporary attempt to reject the historical violence of pacification.

715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back

In partnership with the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, I developed a public-facing art/ history gallery commemorating the history of student-faculty activism through campus art installations and protest art. The first phase of the project led to a digital gallery proposal endorsed by both University of Michigan Departments. I am currently writing grants to bring the project closer to rendered digital reality.

——-

Public Speaking and Conferences

I have discussed and presented my work in national and international conferences, as a guest lecturer, and as an invited speaker at workshops and symposia. My latest presentations include ACLA2025, SCOLAS2025, RMCLAS2025, MLA24, and international conferences and theory labs at UT Austin, the University of Michigan, King’s College, and Indiana University. I have also shared my creative writing in academic/ non-academic public spaces like the Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI).