Announcements, Presentations

Assistant Professor Presents During FRI Lecture Series

Belinda Wallace, BILS Assistant Professor, presented, “Queering Caribbean Slave Rebellions: Gender, Intimacy, & Freedom” during UNM’s Feminine Research Institutes Fall Lecture Series. Wallace’s presentation situates literary invention as a means to re-vision historical record(s) and to make visible left out, rejected, erased, or simply ignored queer lives. Her use of “queering” represents queer Black women’s entry into the political authority of self-representation and such entry contests the masculinist, heteronormative, and singular narrative of liberation traditionally put forth in transatlantic studies. Using an intersectional standpoint, her talk foregrounds Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads, where Wallace investigates Hopkinson’s use of intimacy between enslaved Black women as a means to “queer” and reposition Makandal’s slave rebellion of 1758 on the island of St. Domingue (modern day Haiti). In so doing, Wallace demonstrate how we can reconfigure conventional understandings of rebellions and illuminate the thorny nature(s) of Black liberation, subjectivity, and belonging.