JOSHUA R. DECKMAN
Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies
Stetson University
ABOUT
Joshua Deckman, PhD, is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Stetson University. He has written on racial and affective politics, Afro-diasporic religious practices, and anti-imperial/decolonial epistemologies in contemporary Caribbean and Latinx literary and cultural productions. The keywords that organize his publications and courses are: feminism, religious studies, queer studies, decolonization, critical race studies, and transnational studies. His work has appeared in Small Axe Salon, Voces del Caribe, Romance Notes, and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. He is currently working on a forthcoming edited collection, Oxalá: Afro-Latinx Futures, Imaginings, and Engagements (SUNY Press), as well as a solo manuscript titled Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Racial Politics in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas (SUNY Press). This last project traces, documents, analyzes, and theorizes the links or relationships between Afro-Latinx identities, spiritualities, and futures (understood in the most expansive ways). In short, the text evokes the ways in which processes of colonization, (neo)imperial impulses, and heteropatriarchal violence are disrupted when we center a Black spiritual resistance to imposed systems of (Western) knowledge. This, in turn, allows other modes of being to emerge and calls for a transformation in the ways we think racialized belonging across Caribbean geographies.
He is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled Sovereign Freaks: Youth Culture and Politics in Contemporary Latine Literature. It explores how radical intellectual communities of Black cuir Caribbean and Central American writers develop sovereign imaginaries in relation to one another through the figure of the radical "freak," to combat capitalist and imperialist projects of domination. To explore this phenomenon, the book focuses on a cluster of poets, essayists, radicals, and intellectuals who trace their migrations from Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Haiti.
His most recent article "Cuerpos transloca(le)s: Trazando una geografía loca del Caribe en La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos" is forthcoming in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (98.1, 2021).
Alongside his colleagues Dr. Yerodin Lucas, Dr. Lia Richards-Palmiter, and Dr. Adam Shprintzen, he has collaboratively worked on a grant awarded by the AACU to establish a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center at Marywood. This center is aimed at eradicating racism and racial disparity through anti-racist pedagogy and other campus-wide initiatives. The Center engages with the Scranton community by partnering with organizations such as the Black Scranton Project to explore alternative narratives of belonging and history in the NEPA area.
RESEARCH
Joshua's primary research and teaching interests include contemporary Afro-Latinx and Caribbean literature and cultural studies, specifically as they address the categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Broadly, his publications and courses engage spiritual systems of the African Diaspora, emotional/affective narratives, anti- imperial/colonial politics, critical race studies, border studies, feminism, and queer studies. Below you will find a selection of published works.
He is the author of "Killing Joy: The Racial Politics of Happiness and Love in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones," which is currently under review in the Cincinnati Romance Review.
His article "Cuerpos transloca(le)s: Trazando una geografía loca del Caribe en La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos de Luis Rafael Sánchez" is published in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (98.1, 2021).
His article on black cyberfeminism and erotic pleasure in decolonial Cuba “Viviendo happy: Una visión espiritual de la felicidad en 'Negra Cubana tenía que ser' de Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez,”is also featured in Voce del Caribe, Revista de Estudios Caribeños (2020).
His work on nomadic communities in Spain, "Sueños utópicos: Espacios, geografías y comunidades al margen de la sociedad española en El mapa de la espera,” is available in Romance Notes 57.3 (2017).
His interview with Josefina Báez, “El Ni’e: Inhabiting Love, Bliss, and Joy; a conversation with Josefina Báez,” is featured in Small Axe, a journal of critical Caribbean studies.
His reviews of Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation and The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction can be found in the Journal of Comparative Literature Studies and Voces del Caribe, respectively.
In addition to his monographs listed below, Joshua is currently working on several article length projects, book chapters, and an interview with Elizabeth Acevedo.
BOOKS AND EDITED VOLUMES
OXALÁ: AFRO-LATINX FUTURES, IMAGININGS, AND ENGAGEMENTS
Currently under contract with SUNY University Press, the essays of this volume draw upon multiple disciplinary methodologies (storytelling traditions, anthropological research, archival analyses, literary criticism, among others) in order speak to the futures past of Afrolatinidad. In this way, the authors take a critical approach to challenging the homogenizing effects of national and regional notions of belonging implicit in the term "Afro-Latinx."
FEMINIST SPIRITUALITIES IN THE AFRO-CARIBBEAN AND ITS DIASPORAS
Published with SUNY Press (2023), this project analyzes how afro-descendent women from various contexts (Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, and these communities in New York) employ religious figures and practices from Vodou, Santería, and Espiritismo in order to advocate for a radical politics of decolonial love, intimacy, and remembrance. The book aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics.
CV
TEACHING
Teaching Philosophy
As I continue to study language, I have found that, no matter the individual learning style, it is more enjoyable, more effective, and more productive to study in an environment that motivates active learning. It takes the part of the student to pursue goals with an open mind and willingness to learn, but it is equally the job of the teacher to direct students to valuable materials and to develop an environment of high achieving and open communication.
An effective teaching method is important to structure the class. It builds upon the students’ knowledge by presenting realistic goals and fostering communication. Mentorship and direct interaction with my students both in and out of the classroom is critical to my role as an instructor - this fosters open communication and gives the student a sense of investment in their education.
Likewise, I believe that every classroom presents a unique community of learners who vary in both abilities and learning styles. My role as a teacher is to provide students with the tools necessary to take charge of their own education in a way that they see fit. Education serves to provide students with the information necessary to progress through life, and it also introduces scholars to a variety of skills that they may use to partake in the educational process as they forge their own path in their journey of academic enlightenment. The students in any class room will display a variety of learning modalities and it is the instructor’s job to discover these modalities and create lessons based upon them.
Whether on campus or abroad, I am committed to interdisciplinary and innovative teaching that reflects my research interests in 20th and 21st century Latinx and Caribbean literature and culture. I plan to integrate digital humanities methods in my pedagogy and envision using open source mapping tools like StoryMap or Carto to design alternative or supplemental assignments in special topics courses. For example, I could have students create online narrative maps that track the steps of Bernardo Vega as he writes his experience in his Memoirs. In this way, textual analysis, research, and digital methods/media can come together to open new avenues for scholarly activity as well as personal expression. With the future always on my mind, I constantly think of ways to devise new content and approaches that will challenge and captivate my twenty-first century learners.
Study Abroad
For three years, Joshua co-directed summer trips to Puebla, Mexico.
Here, students spent six weeks living and studying, while supplementing their classroom experiences with trips to Mexico City, Querétaro, Oaxaca, and Guanajuato.
Joshua led a Spring Break trip to Puerto Rico in March 2019. During this trip, we worked with community organizations to rebuild in the aftermath of
hurricane María.
Joshua is currently planning a trip to Tucson, Arizona in conjunction with his US Latinx Writers course. Students will work with organizations
such as the Tucson Samaritans and learn first-hand the history and faces of US border politics.
SELECTED COURSES
See below for a selection of undergraduate courses that I have designed and taught. Please refer to my CV for additional course information and abbreviated descriptions.
Community-Engaged Research and Initiatives
Among the most urgent challenges facing the US is ongoing racial, ethnic, and economic segregation. Increasing aversion to difference and rising distrust among communities nationally have left colleges and universities with the challenge of healing from the legacies and violences of racism. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is partnering with higher education institutions to develop Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers to prepare the next generation of strategic leaders and critical thinkers to promote racial healing and to catalyze efforts to address current inequities grounded in notions of a racial hierarchy. As a national, community-based initiative, the TRHT effort seeks to address the historical and contemporary effects of race and racism within our communities. Each TRHT Campus Center prioritizes expansive, community-based healing activities that seek to change collective community narratives and broaden the understanding of our diverse experiences.
At Marywood, we plan to take the TRHT framework and apply it to our communities and do the work necessary for systemic social change at our University and in the NEPA region.
EXPLORATIONS IN AFRO-LATINX CULTURAL STUDIES
Students examine literary and cultural works across an array of Afro-Latinx experiences and diasporas, including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. We situate these productions in historical and social contexts to analyze how race, gender, and sexuality complicate easy definitions of latinidad. By privileging the Black perspective, we explore how the category “Latino” has been shaped by racial hierarchies and internal gaps/silences. In this way, students learn how the relatively new category of “Afro-Latinx” allows us to occupy the borders and examine a history that has been silenced within the broader categories of “Latinx,” “Black,” and “African American.”
US LATINX WRITERS
This course explores a trajectory of US Latinx literary and cultural productions. Some of the main topics that the course addresses include: the politics of labeling; definitions of exile, migration, and diaspora; race and the conceptualizations of race; the politics of language; imaginary homelands and geographic spaces; and conceptualizations/politics of gender and sexuality. In addition to classroom discussions, this course offers a week-long trip to Tuscon, Arizona where students work with the Tucson Samaritans and Casa Alitas to provide water and other supplies for those crossing the desert. Students learn first-hand about border history and how this history affects people in the region, from Border Patrol and ICE agents to undocumented migrants to those trying to prevent deaths in the desert and to indigenous peoples/Mexican families who lived in this place long before the geo-political border was established.
LATIN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION
This introductory course on the cultures and civilizations of Latin America and the Caribbean covers an expansive stretch of time from the pre Conquest to the present through a thematic approach. Interdisciplinary in nature, we will examine Latin American and Caribbean politics, history, and society through literature, film, popular art, and music. Considerable time will be devoted to explaining the conceptualization of Latin American and Caribbean geographies, including their complex history, regional diversity, and popular imaginary, as well as the representation of identities—racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed, etc. and the ongoing circumstances that affect these representations. Furthermore, this course will emphasize a non- hierarchical approach to cultural products by examining “high” art, literature, “popular” culture, music, and images from advertising and the media (blogs, TV commercials, etc.) in a comparative perspective. Finally, we will expand upon the traditional notions of the “Latino” Americas to consider Latinx populations living, working, resisting, and creating inside of the US.
CENTRAL MEXICAN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION
Taught in Puebla, Mexico through Penn State's Faculty-Led Summer Program, this intensive summer course is aimed at developing students’ knowledge of Central Mexico’s historical, geographical, and cultural landscape. Students refine language skills through reading, oral presentations, and writing assignments, while visiting several sites in Puebla, Mexico City, Querétaro, and Guanajuato to reinforce information reviewed in classroom
