DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

Research Interests:

20th-century Afro-Latin American and Caribbean History; Haitian and Haitian Diaspora Studies; Histories of Race, Empire, and Migrant Labor in the Caribbean; Border Policing and Detention; Caribbean Feminisms; Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Social Movements and Political Thought.

Biography:

Marissa Joseph (she/her) is a PhD student in Black Studies and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Northwestern University. Her research investigates how U.S. interventionism and empire throughout the twentieth century gave rise to anti-Haitian immigration regimes in the Caribbean. In particular, her work examines Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean as interconnected borderlands of imperial labor, exploring how the movement, labor, and diasporic world-making of Haitian migrants have influenced formations of race and citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Drawing on Black and Third World feminist perspectives on the machinations of archival power, Marissa engages oral histories and embodied practices alongside textual analysis to resurrect histories produced by Haitian migrants from within the kafou. Marissa holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow. Her senior thesis examined how Haitian women in Cuba made meaning, preserved memory, and forged alternative visions of diasporic identity and belonging during the decades following the Cuban Revolution. It received summa cum laude distinction and was awarded best senior thesis in the Departments of History and Literature; Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights; and African and African American Studies (relating to the African Diaspora).