Research

Imagined Scholars bridges legal and literary studies to pioneer insights into state and power's operations regarding international scholars in the U.S. This project uncovers a polarizing imaginary of the international student as either an ambassador of American interests or a threat to national security in U.S. law and policy.  I examine the legal texts that have regulated student immigration from 1924 to the present, focusing on policies and cases typical of the post-9/11 migratory regime, to trace the emergence of the international student as a central trope in twentieth-century legal, political, and cultural discourse. 

I study the portrayal of international students in American legal and policy texts in the ways that literary critics study patterns in the composition of characters and narrative arcs within and across literary works. 

I argue that the dynamics of characterization of international students in these official documents reveal the U.S. state's strategies to absorb and manage international difference, and show how the American university has been commandeered for this purpose. My analysis demonstrates that the polarizing conception of international scholars as ambassadors or threats is deployed to justify increasingly intense measures of control and surveillance over both students and campuses, and to ensure the cooperation of university staff with immigration authorities.  

As a cultural formalist project, Imagined Scholars posits the figure of the international student as a repository for a nation's aspirations for global influence and its anxieties about external threats upon which hinges a relationship between border enforcement and university bureaucracy.

In this paper, partly a bibliographic essay and partly an argument for the foregrounding of feminist of color elders who inform reconfigurations of the university’s epistemological hierarchies, I narrate how Bridge’s “theory in the flesh” brought me to consider the particular elements of class that the person and persona of the international student contains. For one, the legal and political discourse that constructs international students' desirability as migrant subjects relies on the expectation that these students are extracted from the dominant classes in their respective countries and will, thus, return to lead their countries of origin as agents of American racial capitalism. At the same time, many of these students come to the U.S to become racialized and, thus, (why not?) possibly radicalized. Indeed, the stories of several contributors to This Bridge Called my Back – Judit Moscovitch, Aurora Levins Morales, and Mirtha Quintanales among them – also illustrate the radical alternatives whereby migration and a contact with the U.S American university opens the door to a coming to (a racial, ethnic, gendered, and social) consciousness. In the face of forced intellectual assimilation, hipervigilance, and control that immigration regulations impose, how can we become international students and scholars who refuse to accommodate to the forms that hegemonic power envisions for us? How are the elements of this refusal already present and active in the writings of the Black and Indigenous women who came together in the feminist anthology and chorus that is This Bridge Called my Back? How do we respond from the university to the call these elders posed?

Presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association (2018)

This paper interrogates Toni Morrison's decision to set Tar Baby in the Caribbean. This novel is the only one in the author's repertoire in which the action occurs largely outside of the U.S. More importantly, the setting has been constructed in a way such that the physical characteristics of a Caribbean island - its particularities as a territory and a landscape- inform one of the novel's main explorations: the limits and possibilities of an Afrodiasporic community in the West, within a context of Global North-Global South dynamics of political, social and economic exploitation of the latter by the former.

I examine how, in the novel, the architecture of human constructions clearly delimits the spaces of Americanness, African Americanness and Caribbeanness. Contrary to that bounded configuration of space, nature constantly and actively trespasses those limits. I also show that in the Caribbean of Tar Baby the divide between the real and the mythic ceases to exist. In that process, the Caribbean emerges as a space in which a Eurocentric system of thought that divides nature and culture has no bearing or power.