Donette Francis

Caribbean Art and Its Diasporas Fellow

06/11/2022–08/19/2022

Donette Francis is the founding co-director for the Center for Global Black Studies and past director of the American Studies Program at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. An associate professor of English and inaugural member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. Professor Francis is the author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. She is currently working on two book projects: Illegibilities: Caribbean Cosmopolitanisms and the Problem of Form, an intellectual history of the Anglophone Caribbean’s transnational literary culture from 1940 to 1970 and Creole Miami: Black Arts in the Magic City, a sociocultural history of Black arts practice in Miami from the 1970s to the present. During her time at the Clark, she will complete an essay about the aesthetics of Black Refugee Time in the practice of Afro-Cuban Miamian visual artist Juana Valdés.