Melanie White

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

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, Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Coloniality and Black and Indigenous Women’s Refusal, traces Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous women’s political organizing, cultural production, and anticolonial practices on the Miskitu Coast from the seventeenth century 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.