Andy Alfonso is a fourth-year graduate student in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Princeton. His research interests lie at the intersection of historiography, literature, and cartography, with a special focus on diasporic, circum-Atlantic exchanges from the colonial period to the present. Among other topics, he has studied and written on forms of “Black” insurgency, comparative slavery in the Caribbean, and Afro-Cuban religions in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. His interests also comprise indigenous and subaltern studies, queer necropolitics, and the role of affect theory in the so-called “imaginative inquiry” (a tantalizing approach to writing history based on inferences and speculation, hypotheses and imagination). His dissertation deals with archival opacity and shadow lives in post-1959 Cuba, that is, journeys and discourses that exceed the limits of “official” narratives while challenging the linear, organic teleology of classified “national history”. Andy has published some of his work in Cuba Counterpoints, Hypermedia Magazine, and the New West Indian Guide.
