Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Graduate Student
BA 2002 (Literature; Ethnicity, Race, & Migration) Yale University
Regional focus: The Americas, the Caribbean, Cities

Most broadly speaking, I am interested in the ways in which human difference is thought about and acted on in the world. Taking in analyses of literature, music, sport, and politics, my work is guided by the principle that cultural practices and machineries of representation play not merely a reflexive but a constitutive role in social and political life. More specifically, I am interested in how the various processes associated with “globalization” are currently impacting the formation of both cultural identities and political subjectivities. I believe that better understanding the ways in which social and national belonging is mediated through particular conceptions of shared identity and culture is a crucial project today, intrinsic to the task of building political orders celebratory of difference yet based in our deeper commonalities as human beings.

My particular geographic area of focus is the Americas, broadly conceived to include the lands and peoples of the entire Western Hemisphere. The Caribbean has thus far served as the especial focus of my work, in part because there the most salient characteristics of the Americas in general are brought into starkest relief: traumatic popular histories of colonialism, genocide, and slavery; migration, cultural mixing, and creolization as basic facts of life for centuries; the location of rooted identity elsewhere for all but a very few native inhabitants; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World. Though I am now especially interested in approaching these problems in the context of North American cities, the basic question remains the same: namely, to paraphrase C.L.R. James: what do the extraordinary particulars of cultural and political life in the Americas have to teach us about the whole of human civilization?

Selected publications

"An Empire of Vice:
Cuba and the USA"[pdf]
The Nation
June 29, 2009

"The Bob Marley Story"
The New York Review of Books
April 9, 2009

"The Worlds of African Literature:
An Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie"[pdf]
The Believer
January 2009

"In Congo Square:
Colonial New Orleans"[pdf]
The Nation
December 29, 2008

"Island Mentality"
(Op-Ed essay: Cuba after Fidel)
The Guardian(UK)
March 18, 2008

"MLK for today"
(Book review essay: King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff)
San Francisco Chronicle
January 20, 2008

"Order and Progress"
(film review: Manda Bala, Jason Kohn, dir.)
The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Spring 2007

"Borders and Crossers:
An Interview with Rebecca Solnit"
The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Fall 2007

“Our Dark Places”
(book review essay: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis)
Mother Jones
May 5, 2006

“A Voyager Revisited”
(book review: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis)
Los Angeles Times
March 25, 2006

“Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947”
San Francisco Chronicle
February 12, 2006

"Making Movies in Latin America"
The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Winter 2006

“’Are We All Creoles Now?’:
Ethnicity and Nation in a Heterogeneous Caribbean Diaspora”
in Ethnicity, Class and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions,
Anton Allahar, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005)

“The Value(s) of Identity”
(book review essay: The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah)
Tikkun
November-December 2005

“Counterinsurgency, Iraq, and the Salvador War”
(movie review: Voces Inocentes/Innocent Voices , Luis Mandoki , dir.)
Mother Jones
October 24, 2005.

“A comic genius lost behind his blackface”
(book review: Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips)
San Francisco Chronicle
September 25, 2005

“Modernity and Its Outcasts”
(book review essay: Wasted Lives by Zygmunt Bauman)
Tikkun
July-August 2004

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Selected publications

Contact information