Sponsored by the Thomas and Catherine McMahon Fund and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department, Wesleyan University presents Sophie Maríñez who will deliver the lecture “Prophecies from the Caribbean: On Birthright Citizenship and the Need for Decolonizing Democracy.” This event will take place om Match 30, 4:30pm, in the RL&L Common Room, 300 High Street, Middletown, Connecticut. The talk will be in English with a reception to follow. See description below.
Description: This talk draws on Dr. Sophie Maríñez’s book Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2024) to examine how birthright citizenship can be dismantled through constitutional violence, producing spirals of statelessness that echo across time and space. Focusing on the Dominican Republic’s 2013 Constitutional Court ruling that retroactively stripped citizenship from descendants of Haitian immigrants, Dr. Maríñez situates this decision within a longer history of anti-Blackness rooted in the revolutionary challenge posed by Haiti’s independence and abolition of slavery in 1804.
Dr. Sophie Maríñez is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a faculty member at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Sponsored by the Thomas and Catherine McMahon Fund and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department, Wesleyan University presents Sophie Maríñez who will deliver the lecture “Prophecies from the Caribbean: On Birthright Citizenship and the Need for Decolonizing Democracy.” This event will take place om Match 30, 4:30pm, in the RL&L Common Room, 300 High Street,
