Biography
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006
Guadalupe García specializes in the history of cities and colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research examines the intersections of colonialism, empire, and urban space and focuses on free, black, and enslaved peoples in Havana. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies and Cultural Studies. García's fellowships and awards include a Distinguished Fellowship at the CUNY Grad Center's Advanced Research Collaborative and research and digital fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. She has also held a Transatlantic Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick in the UK. Professor García is currently at work on a second book project that explores the use of digital humanities to interrogate how space, scale, and mapping can be used to counter the logic of the archive and expand our contemporary understanding of urban areas.
Field Specializations
Havana, Cuba, Caribbean and Latin American history, urban studies, race and colonialism
Teaching Interests
Professor García teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focused on her core research interests as well as on the broader histories of the Caribbean and Latin America. She was awarded a 2019-2020 William L. Duren Professorship by Newcomb-Tulane College.
Research
Guadalupe García's first book, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana (University of California Press, 2016) is based on archival research in Cuban, North American, and Spanish archival collections. Beyond the Walled City begins with the founding of the city in the early sixteenth century and extends through the end of the U.S. military occupation in 1902. It explores the relationship between city space and Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. Among its contributions, the book illustrates urban-based patterns of imperial rule and argues that colonialism in the Caribbean (and neocolonialism beyond it) was not simply concentrated in the institutions, disciplines, and discourses of the Spanish empire.
Professor García's current book, Black Urban Space and Colonial Logic in Nineteenth Century Havana, returns to García's interests in the nineteenth-century city. This project is part research endeavor and part methodological exercise—it explores the role of digital technologies to examine the multiple, layered geographies of the nineteenth-century city. Black Urban Space visually narrates a history of the city through the lens of space, freedom, slavery, and economic and cultural exchange while focusing on the meanings created by a legal urban body. One of its goals is to map the spaces in which black colonial subjects moved and reorient the visual image of the city (in this case Havana), making visible the ways in which port cities across the Atlantic facilitated black, Caribbean, and creole mobility. This is a born-digital project with a print component that will allow access to the work outside of the academic community.
García's current research brings into sharp relief the importance of methodological innovation and collaborate work. She has also co-authored articles with Dr. Lisa B.Y. Calvente, a black diaspora and performance scholar, that employ visual ethnographic methods and archival work to explore theories of urban space. In two of these projects, The City Speaks (published by Cultural Studies) and “A Haunting Presence: Black Absence and Racialized Mappings in Colonial and Contemporary Louisiana” (article under review), García and Calvente pursue historical inquiry that troubles the disciplinary boundaries of the field as well as western notions of archival knowledge that privilege text and materiality.
Books
Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance, co-edited with Lisa B.Y. Calvente. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Articles
“A Haunting Presence: Black Absence and Racilaized Mappings in Colonial and Contemporary Louisiana,” under review, Cultural Studies, 2019.
‘La ciudad antigua y la ciudad nueva:’ Desplazamiento de las zonas centrales en la La Habana colonial.” Revista de patrimonio Iberoamericano 53, no. 7 (July 2015): 22-30.
“The City Speaks: Dis/Articulating Revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and Global Belonging,” with Lisa B.Y. Calvente. Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (Feb. 2014): 438-462.
“Urban Guajiros: Colonial Reconcentración, Rural Displacement, and Criminalization in Western Cuba, 1895-1902.” Journal of Latin American Studies 43, no. 2 (Aug. 2011): 209-235.
“Nuestra patria La Habana: Reading the 1762 British Occupation of the City.” Nuevo Mundo/ Mundos Nuevos 31 (March 2011), online.