Ph.D. candidate
About
My research interests emerge from a need to understand critically the process of how failed and failing colonial logistics become weaponized through the fiction that justifies it. The genesis of my current research project, the dissertation "Presente! Noise in the Archive: The Fiction of Decolonial Storytelling and the Riot of Indios of 1692," was a confrontation with the challenge of the “record of the colonial” being as palpable as it is scattered across historical periods and geographies.
What began as an attempt to trace historically the fallacy of the colonia narrative of success from Early Modern Iberian literature and history grew into a deeper need to embrace the anachronism and geographical effusiveness not only of that fiction, but of its planetary manifestations in the present. It was not until after 2018 saw the Museum of History fire in Rio de Janeiro and the slaying of elected official, activist, and community archivist Marielle Franco that the pragmatic manifestation of the colonial emboldened my critical urge to engage it across temporal, geographic, and area studies divides. “Presente! Noise in the Archive: The Fiction of Decolonial Storytelling and the Riot of Indios of 1692” insists on the efficacy of intertwining archival historical research, contemporary politics, and literary analysis as a comparative-literature approach to performing justice in academic research.
Relying on the relationship between literature, the archive, memory, and the contemporary conditions for justice-oriented work in the humanities, I am working to articulate "political noise" as that which is deemed responsible for its own failure in the colonial order, and therefore bereft of the need for justice in the fictional backdrop of the colonial.
In my dissertation, I seek to present an archival and literary articulation of "political noise" from the birth of the Archivo de Indias to the political assassination of Marielle Franco. As my method and argument show, woven from the same anachronism and idyosynchracry that makes noise diffuse, such an archival, literary, and critical race studies intwrwining of the two pehnomena of "colonial archival" generates an interpretative "pause" in the linking of colonial fiction and the failing logistics it justifies.
