My research explores ritual performance and art throughout the Caribbean. More broadly, I explore the role of performance and embodied knowledge in an African Diaspora context with a particular focus on borders in the Global South. Additionally, as an artist scholar, I explore and create experimental feminist cinema and feminist sensory filmmaking.
Feminist Sensory Ethnography: Embodied Filmmaking as a Politic of Necessity
In this article, we call for a feminist sensory ethnography that centers relations of care, subjectivity, and power between filmmakers, film "subjects," and audiences. Through in-depth discussion of two films, Smile4Kime(Guzman 2023) and Nobel Nok Dah (Hong, Lai, and Mihai 2015) we explore three techniques of feminist sensory ethnography—a multisensorial theory of the flesh, sensory accompaniment, and narrative intimacy—that draw on feminist and non-Western genealogies of sensory knowledge production. We see this move away from observational filmmaking as a “politic of necessity” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015) through which the sensory is imbued with embodied knowledge.
The Queens Give Heat: Haitian Women's Spiritual Play-Labor in Rara
Every year in Haiti and its diaspora, the Lenten and Vodou festivals of Rara occur through Easter Sunday. In this article, I argue that religious performances, such as Rara, are critical sites of Black women's social and economic empowerment. In particular, the women performers of Rara or the queens use Rara to empower themselves. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Haiti, I attend to the way Black women transform play and Black religious expression into labor or what I call spiritual play-labor. This concept builds on the works of Robin D.G. Kelley's (1997) and Oneka LaBennett's (2011) in which they attend to the ways that Black youth turn play and Black cultural expression into labor. I use Spiritual play-labor as an analytic to explore the ways that Haitian women turn spiritual performances and Rara's carnivalesque play into labor that is compensated. The queen's reframing of their performance as labor relies upon their understanding of chalè or heat in which Black women's beauty and bodily work are central. Situating myself within the field of Black feminist anthropology, I explore my role as a feminist ethnographer in advocating with the queens to reframe their spiritual play into labor.
Ethnocine Series in Collaboration with Cultural Anthropology’s Screening Room
This series explore feminist and decolonial ethnographic filmmaking of Ethnocine Collective. In out we offer our approach to filmmaking and also showcase core episodes of our podcast Bad Feminists Making Films. Ethnocine Collective members show their films and explore their individual approaches to decolonial and feminist filmmaking.
Checkpoint Nation
Explores mobile borders that are mapped onto the bodies of Haitian and Haitian descendants in the Dominican Republic. In this firsthand account, I explore how mobile checkpoints extend the coordinates and power of the geopolitical border and limit the mobility and movement of many Haitians in the Dominican Republic.