José I. Fusté

Biography

José I. Fusté earned his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, he taught as a lecturer at various universities before completing a  UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in History at UCLA in 2016. He subsequently served as Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Global Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell from 2016 to 2018. His early scholarship focused on the intersections of racism, colonialism, and residential segregation within Puerto Rico’s public housing projects.

He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Entangled Crossings: Afro-Latinx Migrations Between Race and Empire (1860s-1910s), which explores the emergence of a proto-Afro-Latinx identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The work traces how Afro-Cuban and Afro-Boricua intellectuals navigated racial, national, and imperial structures across transnational networks, particularly between New York, Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. By examining the intersections of Blackness, Latinidad, and empire, Fusté critically engages with how these figures contributed to racial and political debates, while challenging dominant historiographies that have often silenced or marginalized their contributions.

Fusté is also working on a second project that explores the ongoing legacies of the U.S. colonial invasions of 1898 in the Hispanophone Antilles. It examines how these “afterlives” affect human and non-human actors at multiple nested scales of coloniality, framing debts resulting from colonial inequities not through anthropocentric allegories but as multi-layered obligations that transcend liberal-capitalist systems of recognition. By focusing on the relational dynamics between humans, other species, and nature, the project aims to recalibrate historical injury and agency, positioning insular colonies like Puerto Rico as pivotal sites for rethinking post-colonial political futures and justice.

Fusté is also the co-creator and founding editor of the “The Bomba Wiki Project: Oral, Aural, and Corporeal History and Community-Making through Bomba Music and Dance” (bombawiki.com) which was awarded a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the Walter Chapin Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in 2017. At UC San Diego, he offers undergraduate and graduate courses on Critical Geography, Relational Colonialities and Empire, Critical Latinx and Chicanx Studies, Archipelagic Studies, and Black/Afro-Latinx culture and politics throughout Abya Yala (aka Turtle Island or the Americas), and Interdisciplinary Archive Studies.

Research Interests

Interdisciplinary Post-Positivist History and Historiography (especially Hispanophone Antillean late-19th and early-20th Century Politics, Social Movements, and Migration); Transnational Ethnic Studies; Transcolonial Relationalities; Critical Latinx Studies; Black Studies; Afro-Latinx Studies; Decolonial Theory; Political Economy of Racial Capitalism; Critical Masculinity Theory; Critical Geography; Conjunctural Cultural Studies; Archipelagic American Studies; Metahistorical Pastness Studies; Music and Sound Studies

Publications

Fusté, José I. (accepted). “Antillanismo, Solidarities, and 1898 in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Forthcoming, and the Hemisphere.” The Cambridge History of the Caribbean, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). 

Fusté, José I. (2020). “Schomburg’s Blackness of a Different Matter: A Historiography of Refusal.” Small Axe 24(1): 120-131.

Fusté, José I. (2017) “Repeating Islands of Debt: Historicizing the Transcolonial Relationality of Puerto Rico’s Economic Crisis.” Radical History Review 128.

Fusté, José I. (2016). “Translating Negroes into Negros: Rafael Serra’s trans-American Entanglements between Black Cuban Racial and Imperial Subalternity, 1895-1909.” In Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. Edited by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel. New York: Palgrave-McMillan.

Fusté, José I. (2014). “Unsettling Citizenship/Circumventing Sovereignty: Reexamining the Quandaries of Contemporary Anti-Colonialism in the US Through Black Puerto Rican Anti-Racist Thought.” American Quarterly, 65:4, 161-169.

Fusté, José I. (2010). “Containing Bordered ‘Others’ in la Frontera and Gaza: Comparative Lessons on Racialization and State Violence.” American Quarterly, 62:4, 811-819. 

Fusté, José I. (2010). “Colonial Laboratories, Irreparable Subjects: The Experiment of ‘(B)ordering’ San Juan’s Public Housing Residents” Social Identities, 16:1, 41-59.  

Also check out his essays in 80grados.net, Puerto Rico’s premier independent digital magazine, offering sharp critical commentary and in-depth analysis on socio-political, cultural, and artistic issues, blending alternative journalism with academic rigor.