Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies

(Humanities and Information Scholar, Spring 2027)

The aim of this book-length project is to foreground the way in which art objects, specifically analog and digital photographs, constitute a form of memory-making in the context of Latin American/Latinx and Caribbean diasporic life.  More precisely, the project analyzes memory-objects as employed by diasporic subjects to connect to their past personal and collective histories after painful displacements. The importance of this memory-making lies in its possibility of dealing with, if not reconfiguring, the nostalgia and mourning tethered to life in the diaspora. In its emphasis on the mnemonic possibilities of these objects as created within intersubjective contexts, the project considers how memory itself is not passive or archival, as if it were to be found a cabinet of consciousness, but active and relational. It consequently highlights not the evidentiary status or truthfulness of memory but its possibility as an act of meaning-making for the purpose of honoring communities and traditions that have been overshadowed by colonial practices. As such, the project treats the relationship between memory and art-object in a decolonial register, attempting to bring to light how, in their memory-making role, art objects sustain the lives of displaced peoples and their desire to maintain linkages to forgotten and undermined histories and traditions.