Franchesca Araújo is a doctoral candidate in African Diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary Caribbeanist scholar. Her dissertation brings together black disability studies and black geographies to trace the production of hegemonic spatial imaginaries and national subjectivities in the Dominican Republic. She uses archival research as well as literary, cultural, and discursive analysis to demonstrate how those are disrupted by alternate spatial imaginaries and subjectivities rendered disorderly, deficient, and excessive along raced, classed, gendered, and spatialized axes. She engages a variety of 20th and 21st century events and media, including dembow and bachata music videos, 20th century poetry, archival documents, and newspaper clippings. 

 

Franchesca’s research interests broadly include black and cultural geographies, cultural studies, literature and expressive cultures, critical theory, political economy, gender and sexuality, and Caribbean anti-colonial thought. Her poetry can be found in When Language Broke Open (University of Arizona Press), and her scholarship in The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies as well as The Afro-Latin@* Reader: Vol 2 (Duke University Press).