It's an honor to receive affirmation and recognition of my work in such a formal way.
I'm elated to accept this award alongside several of my brilliant UC Berkeley peers and am grateful for the mentorship and advice that has gotten me this far. A special shout out to Berkeley Professors Dan Perlstein, Tianna Paschel, Brandi Summers, and Travis Bristol!
My research interests stem from a lifelong desire to learn about and to be in a community with Black folks all over the world. More specifically, my dissertation topic emerged from a series of relationships I've developed with Black activists in Brazil alongside a series of questions I have about the conditions that shape the possibilities and limits for transnational solidarity against imperial violence.
Being a researcher at Berkeley
Doing this work at Berkeley has afforded me the opportunity to connect with folks invested in Black diaspora studies across various disciplines. I've found that being a graduate student at Berkeley has encouraged, and in many ways required, me to lean into interdisciplinarity.
‘We, on the other side’: Black Internationalism against the Lusophone World, 1950s-1980s
In the decades following the second world war, Black Brazilians were entering into a racialized political consciousness at unprecedented levels at the same time that Africans in the Portuguese colonies were at war for national independence. Against the backdrop of these liberation struggles, several transnational education programs were constructed that, often unintentionally, facilitated relationships between these movements. As a result, ideas about sovereignty, self-determination, blackness, and liberation reverberated across the South Atlantic as activist-intellectuals traveled toward, read about, and fought alongside each other. This dissertation examines how these black internationalist networks forged between militants in Brazil and anti-colonial revolutionaries of Portuguese-speaking Africa (primarily Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau) shaped the intellectual currents of their respective movements. Drawing on archived exchanges, Black and mainstream press publications, organizational documents, and Portuguese and Brazilian surveillance documents, I ask questions not only of the ideas that migrated but of the routes that made them possible. It is my hope that this work will further our understanding of the histories of Black internationalism, the conditions of possibility for transnational solidarity, and the intellectual legacy of global struggles against racism and colonialism.