Odette Casamayor-Cisneros

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is a Cuban-born scholar of contemporary Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. She received her Ph.D. in Art and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2002 and taught at the University of Connecticut, before joining Penn in 2019. Her current scholarship is centered on Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx cultural production and epistemologies.

Prof. Casamayor-Cisneros is the author of Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (Vervuert, 2013). The book examines, through the lens of literary production, the existential void experienced by Cubans after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc in the 1990s. She has also published the collection of stories Una casa en Los Catskills (1st edition, La Secta de los Perros, 2012, and 2nd edition, Letras Cubanas, 2016). 

Casamayor is currently working on three book projects:

• Birthing Ourselves: Black Womanhood and Epistemological Marronage in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Production.

An in-depth analysis of a wide selection of autobiographic, fictional, and poetic accounts of the Black experience, authored by renowned contemporary Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American women writers, this monograph examines the ontological reinvention of the self, through the deconstruction of the ideas of Blackness, womanhood, and Latin American and Caribbean identities, while simultaneously producing radically different narratives of Black female empowerment and new counter-hegemonic epistemologies.

• In Black Ink: Writings From the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman.

A memoir-like rendition of Casamayor’s Black, female, Caribbean, and diasporic experience. At the intersection of personal experiences, collective memory, epistemological research, and the expansion of poetic knowledge, this project anthologizes her bi-weekly column "Con tinta negra," published since 2020 in the magazine OnCuba News.

• On Being Blacks: Self-Identification and Counter-hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Cultural Production.

An ethical-aesthetic comprehensive study of racial self-definition practices by contemporary Black Cuban visual and performing artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers whose works deploy new images that counteract the invisibility of Blacks and Blackness in Cuban cultural production.