Bio

Dr. Melanie Y. White is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean Studies in the Department of Black Studies and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her research examines the intersections of Blackness, Indigeneity, gender, and sovereignty in Caribbean Central America. Her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Coloniality and Black and Indigenous Women’s Refusal, traces Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous women's political organizing, visual culture, and anticolonial practices on the Miskitu Coast from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on extensive archival research and visual culture analysis, the book reveals how intimate colonial violence has deeply shaped the imperial borderlands of the far western/Central American Caribbean, as well as how Mosquitian women have crafted a vision for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty. More broadly, her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminisms; Afro-Caribbean, Central American, and Latinx art and literature; digital humanities and archival practices; and familial and personal narratives as frameworks for anticolonial criticism.

She is currently at work on two new projects. The first theorizes Miami as a hemispheric Black city where the histories and afterlives of racial formation across the Americas converge and collide. Through readings of visual art, literature, and cultural and intellectual production, it examines how African American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Black Central American communities have shaped Miami as a site of Black life, thought, and political imagination. Her second project traces Afro-Caribbean Central American women's artistic engagements with autonomy in the far western Caribbean. Focusing on mainland communities and the archipelagoes of San Andres and Providencia, the Corn Islands, and the Bay Islands, it illuminates how their work contests displacement, state incorporation, and tourism-driven dispossession while reimagining cultural memory and autonomy across an interconnected world that nation-states have sought to fragment.

Dr. White earned her Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her work is published in Caribbean Quarterly; The Forum for Inter-American Research; Small Axe; Women, Gender, and Families of Color; NACLA Report on the Americas; and the edited volume Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Perspectives and Research. She is also the co-founder and co-coordinator of The Black Central Americas Project and an advisory board member of Recuerdos de Nicaragua.