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José I. Fusté

Assistant Professor

Biography

José I. Fusté received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego in 2012. He taught as a lecturer in various universities between 2012-2015 and completed a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in History at UCLA in 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, he was an Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Global Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell. His early research examined the intersections between racism, colonialism, and residential segregation in Puerto Rico’s public housing projects. Fusté is currently drafting a book manuscript titled Entangled Crossings: Afro-Latino Migrations Between Race and Empire in which he explores the role that US imperialism played in producing solidarities but also in cementing political wedges between afro-descended Latinxs from the Hispanophone Antilleans and Black Americans between the early 1900s and the 1960s. Fusté is also writing a series of research articles—the first of which appeared in the Radical History Review—about the under-acknowledged legal, geostrategic, political, and economic interrelationships between Puerto Rico and other spaces of “concentrated US colonialism”. He is also the co-creators and main 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

  • Transnational Critical Ethnic Studies and American Studies
  • Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx Studies
  • Feminist Studies, Critical Studies of Masculinities
  • Decolonial Studies
  • Critical Geography 
  • Political Economy and Racial Capitalism Studies
  • Histories of Caribbean Colonialisms, Imperialism and Migration
  • Philosophies of History, Memory, and Archives
  • Cultural Politics of Music 
  • Global Studies and Border Studies

Publications

Fusté, José I. (accepted, pending revisions). “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.