Marc D Perry
Assistant Professor
Anthropology and African American Studies

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with a research specialization in race and racialization in the African Diaspora with a regional emphasis on Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. My research and teaching interest include: black transnationalisms; racial identity formation; expressive culture and power, race and national construction, neoliberal social formations, and Cuba. A central focus of my work has been on the role of music, performance, and youth culture in the transnational making of black identities and politics in the contemporary Black Atlantic world.

My current manuscript project examines race and social transformation in late socialist Cuba through the ethnographic site of Cuban hip hop. My emphasis is on the ways Afro-Cuban youth utilize the expressive contours of hip hop “culture” to fashion new, transnationally-attune identities of blackness and corresponding modes of race-based political contest. Such practices, I understand, emerge in strategic response to the shifting dynamics of race and class in a Cuba today increasingly shaped by neoliberal capital transformations. My project thus seeks to elucidate the dialectical play between new structures and processes of racialization, and emergent kinds of race-based social agency as they currently take shape under global late capitalism. Yet at center is an investigation into the potential of transnational and/or diasporic forms of “black” racial identity as the basis for a politics of social action.

Research Interests:

African Diaspora and black transnationalisms; race and ethnicity in Latin Armerica and the Caribbean; racial identity formation; new social movements/neoliberal subject formation; expressive culture, Cuba.

EDUCATION:

Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 2004

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
See my CV for a complete list of publications.

2006	“Transnational Black (Self-)Forgings: Hip Hop as Diasporic Space,” forthcoming in The Black International: From Toussaint to Tupac, Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, editors.
2006	“Hip Hop Cubano and the Performative Makings of Critical Black Space,” under review in Social Text, Duke University Press.
Forth coming	“New Black Revolutionary Imaginings: Hip Hop in Late Socialist Cuba,” The Journal of African American History.

COURSE OFFERINGS:

ANTH 199	RACE AND NATION IN THE SPANISH CARIBBEAN
ANTH 282	DISPLACED PEOPLES OF LATIN AMERICA
ANTH 399MP/ AFRO 398	CULTURE AND POWER IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
ANTH 515P	THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RACE, THE RACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
AFRO	Humanistic Perspectives on the African American Experience – undergraduate course in African American Studies.