Stanford Humanities Center
Judith Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department with a joint appointment in the Latinx Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in multi-disciplinary approaches to literary theory, Black and Latinx studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought.
SHC Project
Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Ricanness
Rodríguez’s first book-project, Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Ricanness, utilizes Afro-Latinx and critical black studies lenses to continue and expand interventions into the hemispheric concept of Latinidad. Impositions focuses on the existential and psychic invention of Puerto Rican identity through the (un)intentional antiblack sentiments of Puerto Rican ethnonational aesthetics. By reinterpreting an aesthetic archive—composed of twentieth-century literary allegories, Puerto Rican feminist poetics, the aurality of Borícua punk, trans/queer documentary filmmaking, and Black queer theatre and performance—“Impositions” contributes a new hemispheric understanding of antiblackness and whiteness that realigns the theoretical axes underlying aesthetic creation within Latinidad more broadly. In doing so, the project understands aesthetics as not removed from the realms of struggle, survival, and violence and shows how antiblack aesthetics play a crucial role in producing the Puerto Rican ethnonation.
