José I. Fusté is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research excavates the political thought and collective action of Afro-Hispanophone Antillean figures whose anti-racist and anti-imperialist commitments have been systematically marginalized in both U.S. and Latin American historiography.
His book manuscript, Entangled Crossings: Afro-Latinx Emergences Through US-Antillean Borderwaters, 1870s–1910s (under contract, UNC Press), combines archival research with literary and cultural analysis to reconstruct the transnational political worlds that Afro-Cuban and Afro–Puerto Rican intellectuals, organizers, and laborers built within and against the structures of late Spanish and then U.S. empire. The project examines how these figures navigated questions of racial identity, colonial subjection, and cross-island solidarity across borders that were simultaneously geographic, juridical, and epistemological.
A second, longer-term project examines what Fusté calls "transcolonial relationality"—the structural and experiential ties between modern American colonialism in Puerto Rico and other zones of concentrated colonial power across the U.S. mainland and overseas empire. Recent publications appear in Small Axe, Radical History Review, and American Quarterly, and he has contributed chapters to Afro-Latinos in Movement (Palgrave-McMillan) and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Caribbean.
Fusté is also a co-creator of the Bomba Wiki (bombawiki.com), a collaborative digital repository of oral, aural, and corporeal knowledge about bomba—the oldest surviving music and dance genre from Puerto Rico and one of the oldest in the Caribbean. For centuries a primary medium of community building and resistance among Afro–Puerto Ricans, bomba has largely escaped conventional archival documentation. The Bomba Wiki is an experiment in building an alternative archive adequate to that history. The project has been supported by a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and a General Campus Research Grant from the UC San Diego Academic Senate.
Address:UCSD, Dept. of Ethnic Studies
9500 Gilman Dr., MC-0522
La Jolla, CA 92093-0522
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