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Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Acting Director of Graduate Studies (Spring 2012)


Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, (Ph.D., UT-Austin, Anthropology, 2005) specializes in black women’s activism, African diaspora studies, critical race and feminist theories, urban geography and politics, and race relations in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has done research in Mexico, Jamaica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. Her most recent work is an ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities, specifically an examination of black women’s participation and leadership in neighborhood associations, and the re-interpretations of racial and gender identities in urban spaces. The second research project is a multi-lingual and transnational exploration of black women’s political work in Latin America.  I examine how black women mobilize political movements across borders and how they understand themselves as agents in creating a diasporic community.

Selected Honors and Awards

  • Funds for Internationalizing the Curriculum, “Race, Rights and Rebellion Seminar” and “Black Women and the Struggle for Land Rights in Colombia and Brazil Symposium,” Brown University, Spring 2011.
  • The C.V. Starr Lectureship Fund, “Transnational Feminism and the Black Diaspora Symposium,” Brown University, November 2009.
  • Future of Minority Studies – Mellon Fellowship, Cornell University, July-August 2008.
  • Africana Research Center Post-doctoral Fellowship, Penn State University, 2007-2008.
  • Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship in Anthropology, Smith College, 2005-2006.
  • Mendenhall Dissertation Fellowship, Smith College, 2004-2005.
  • Carter G. Woodson Fellowship, University of Virginia (declined), 2004-2006.
  • J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship (Brazil), 2003.
  • National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, 2002-2003.
  • Summer Institute on Scholarship, Black Womyn and Africana Studies - Ford Foundation Fellowship, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 2002.
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2000-2002.
  • Debra J. Herring Endowed Memorial Fellowship, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2000-2001.
  • Woman of Distinction Alumna Award, Georgetown University Women’s Center 10th Anniversary Celebration, 2000.

Publications

Books:

  • Politics Below the Asphalt:  Black Women and the Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (under review).

Journal articles:

  • “State Violence and the Ethnographic Encounter:  Feminist Research and Racial Embodiment,” in African and Black Diaspora Studies: An International Journal, Volume 5, Number 1 (2012), pp. 135-154.
  • “‘The Groundings With My Sisters’:  Toward a Black Diasporic Feminist Agenda in the Americas,” in Barnard Center for Research on Women The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 7.2, Spring 2009.
  • “‘If We Didn’t Have Water’:  Black Women’s Struggle for Urban Land Rights in Brazil,” in Environmental Justice, Volume 2, Number 1 (2009), pp. 9-13.
  • “‘Daqui não saio, daqui ninguém me tira’:  Poder e Política na Gamboa de Baixo, Salvador da Bahia [‘I will not leave here, no one will take me away from here’:  Power and Politics in Gamboa de Baixo, Salvador da Bahia],” co-authored with Ana Cristina da Silva Caminha in Revista Gênero, Volume 9, Number 1 (2008), pp.127-153.
  • “Social Memory and Black Resistance: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” in The Latin Americanist,Volume 49, Number 1 (2005), pp.811-831.
    *This article is The Latin Americanist’s top downloaded article from their 2005 list of publications.
  • “The Roots of Black Resistance:  Race, Gender and the Struggle for Urban Land Rights in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” in Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 6 (2004), pp.7-38.

Book chapters:

  • “Margin of the Margins” in Salvador, Brazil:  Black Women Confront the Racial Logic of Spatial Exclusion,” book chapter in Rethinking Global Cities, Xiangming Chen and Ahmed Kanna (eds), Routledge (accepted, publication date: March 2012).
  • “The Case for Collaborative Research in Latin America:  Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, y Puerto Rico,” book chapter co-authored with Joanne Rappaport in Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics, Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen (eds.).  Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press (accepted, publication date: January 2012).
  • “Espaço Urbano e Memoria Coletiva:  O Conhecimento de Mulheres Negras em Lutas Políticas [Urban Space and Collective Memory:  Black Women’s Knowledge in Political Struggles],” book chapter in Brazilian Association of Black Researchers edited volume on urban politics (accepted, publication date: March 2012).  A revised and translated version of journal article “Social Memory and Black Resistance: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil” (2005).
  • “The Black Movement’s ‘Foot Soldiers’:  Grassroots Feminism and Neighborhood Struggles in Brazil,” book chapter in Politics Cultures Identities:  Comparative Perspectives on Afro Latin America, Kwame Dixon and John Burdick (eds), (Gainesville:  University Press of Florida, February 2012).
  • “Racialized History and Urban Politics:  Black Women’s Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles” in Brazil’s New Racial Politics, Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell (eds.), (Boulder:  Lynne Rienner Publishers, October 2009), pp. 141-164.
  • “Politics is uma Coisinha de Mulher (a Woman’s Thing): Black Women’s Leadership in Neighborhood Movements in Brazil” in Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy, Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Glen David Kuecker (eds.), (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, April 2008), pp. 197-211.
  • “Por uma pedagogia feminista negra no Brasil:  O aprendizado das mulheres negras em movimentos comunitários [Toward a Black Feminist Pedagogy in Brazil:  Black Women’s Knowledge in Community Movements]” in Maria Lúcia Rodrigues Muller, Lea Pinheiro Paixão, Editors. Educação, diferenças e desigualdades, 1st Edition.  Cuiabá, Brazil:  EdUFMT (2006), pp. 161-184 (In Portuguese).

Working papers:

  • “‘Margin of the Margins’ in Brazil:  Black Women Confront the Racial Logic of Spatial Exclusion,” Inaugural Working Papers Series, Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College, Volume 1, Number 5 (2009).

Book reviews:

  • Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán, Troubling Gender:  Youth and Cumbia in Argentina’s Music Scene (Choice Review, forthcoming March 2012).
  • (Invited) Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, The Americas:  A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, Vol. 68. No. 2 (2011).  
  • (Invited) Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx:  The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 12, No’s 3& 4 (2010), pp. 522-523.
  • (Invited) Michael A. Gomez, Diasporic Africa: A Reader in The Black Scholar (2008).
  • Kia Lilly Caldwell, Negras in Brazil:  Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity in Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2007), pp. 526-529.
  • (Invited) Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics:  African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism in Cultural Analysis, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. R1-R3.

Photographs:

  • “Silêncio.”  In Ìrohìn, N˚ 23 (2008).

Poems:

  • “Fale aí, preta!”  In Ìrohìn, N˚ 23 (2008).

Art Exhibits:

  • Five photographs featured in exhibit organized by Art for Change entitled “¡Negros!  A Cultural Introspection into the Afro-Latino Diaspora” in Carlitos Café & Galeria, New York City, New York (2006).

Courses Taught

  • Race, Rights and Rebellion
  • Narrating the Radical Self
  • Black Women’s Political Autobiography
  • Race, Gender and Urban Politics
  • Racial and Gender Politics in Contemporary Brazil
  • Theorizing the Black Diaspora