Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz's areas of specialty are Latin American Literatures of the Nineteenth Century and Caribbean Cultural Histories, with a focus on the relationships between culture and politics, slavery, racial formations and visuality, and on the epistemologies and power dynamics that underwrite the construction of archives. She situates these inquiries within a broader transatlantic context, understood as a historical crucible of the cultures of modernity. In her early work, she explored how literature partook in the articulation of discourses of national identity in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the aesthetic forms activated to advance specific anti-colonial projects, and the place of gender and desire as structural elements of those endeavors. This was the subject of her first book, Identidades imaginadas. Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la Guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898), and of multiple essays about the colonial question in Puerto Rico, centuries-long frontier of imperial disputes. In her work, she is also attentive to the role of diasporic communities in the reconfiguration of cultural geographies and national subjectivities. This interest crystallized in her decades-long affiliation with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, an initiative devoted to constructing the literary archive of Spanish-speaking populations in what has become the United States (before the 1960s), and in several scholarly collections produced under its auspices, among them Herencia and En otra voz.

In her current book project, “The Plantation Gaze: Slavery and Visual Culture in Colonial Cuba (1727–1886),” she continues her core interests in the production of alternative archives by examining how the development of a modern visual culture on the island was imbricated, in counterintuitive ways, with the demands of the slaveholding plantation, and its implications for contemporary discussions of the scopic regimes of modernity. Her explorations are geared towards historicizing the complicities between visuality and racialized enslaved domination in the modern world within a complex set of frameworks and are representative of her general outlook on the production of knowledge both in research and teaching: transdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically and ethically aware.