Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Pennsylvania
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s work brings cultural analysis into conversation with Black feminist thought, critical race theory, and the literary, visual, and performance arts. A Cuban scholar, writer, and art critic, she examines Afro-diasporic epistemologies and cultural practices across Latin America and the Caribbean, foregrounding lived experience, embodied memory, and creative expression as vital forms of theorization. Her transdisciplinary approach advances hemispheric understandings of Black cultural production and political imagination.
Casamayor-Cisneros is the author of Utopía, distopía e ingravidez, a study of post-Soviet Cuban literature, and Una casa en los Catskills, a short story collection that explores displacement, intimacy, and belonging. Her forthcoming experimental memoir, In Black Ink: Writings from the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman, offers an intimate meditation on Black womanhood and diasporic identity. Her work has been widely recognized, earning awards from Radio France Internationale and the Cuban Writers and Artists Union, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, and Harvard University (US).
Research Project
Epistemological Marronage: Black Womanhood and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge in a World in Crisis
In a time of unprecedented global upheaval, this project examines how Black women across Latin America and the Caribbean generate forms of knowledge that offer radical frameworks for reimagining humanity and our collective future.
The research introduces two key concepts: epistemological marronage—reinterpreting historical flight from enslavement as a contemporary intellectual and spiritual departure from hegemonic knowledge systems—and ontological self-birth—the deliberate rejection of imposed identities to craft autonomous modes of existence that transcend Eurocentric worldviews. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's notion of the “demonic ground,” it traces how Black women transform their historical and ongoing exclusion from dominant definitions of the human into powerful sites of resistance, survival, and world-building.
Integrating literary and visual analysis, archival research, history, and political thought, Epistemological Marronage demonstrates how Black women's creative and intellectual practices constitute vital counter-hegemonic epistemologies. By reshaping relationality, community, and the meaning of being human, their work opens pathways toward more just and livable worlds.
Research Interests:
Black feminist thought; epistemology; decolonial studies; Afro-Latin American studies; Caribbean studies; postcolonial theory; critical race studies; gender studies; literary analysis; visual culture; archival research; intellectual history; political thought; philosophy of humanity.