About

Elizabeth Marchant is the Chair and an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies department at UCLA. Her academic focus includes Latin American Cultural Studies, Comparative Race and Feminisms in the Americas, and 19th- and 20th-Century Latin American Literature and Film. Her work explores the intersections of gender, race, and cultural expression within Latin American contexts, contributing to the understanding of regional and transnational feminist and cultural dynamics.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Data science
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Law
• Public relations
• Library science
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Alterity and Absence

  2022-05-23

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The future is waiting for us – The role of the permanent record in an enriched & dynamic publishing ecosystem

  Information Services & Use · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  This paper is based on a panel session on various aspects of the Version of Record (VOR) – the permanent record, held at the APE 2022 Conference. It argues that even with the current possibility of sharing versions and elements of the VOR, such as a preprint, an Author Accepted Manuscript or protocols, the VOR still remains valuable. The scholarly community should continue to protect the VOR and recognise it as an enabler of invention. This way, research can be communicated in more rapid, more open and more diverse ways, enabling readers to access a fuller picture of research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Feminist Insurrections

  2022-05-23

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Darwinism and Identity

  2015-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter talks about Aluisio Azevedo's O mulato which is Brazil's first novel to take determinist precepts as a central theme, probing the relationship between science and human identity. The novel thus offers an example of a Brazilian intellectual framing arguments about how emerging scientific theories of evolutionary biology can reshape people understanding of the self and human identity. Reading O mulato for the ways it handles Darwinism and a wide range of fin-de-siecle anxieties about race, degeneration and heredity helps them to appreciate the transnational flow of scientific ideas and the creative work of Brazilian intellectuals probing the connections between culture and biology. Neither fully embracing nor rejecting determinist science, O mulato, confronts questions about innate differences between race and gender, offering conflicted accounts of identity and the consequences of miscegenation. This fictional work probes the realness of race at the moment when evolutionary theory offers new explanations for human differences.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparative Literature Studies: Introduction

  2012-05-22 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2012-06-01

  articleSenior author

  This volume addresses a gap in discussions of transatlantic racial formations and cultural expressions. A rich body of work has emerged in the two decades since the publication of sociologist Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, in which he advances the idea that “cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”1 Defining the black Atlantic as a cultural formation, he points to “intellectuals and activists, writers, speakers, poets, and artists” who articulate the desire to transcend both “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). Looking to shift the discussion of black culture beyond a binary opposition between the national and the diasporic, he attempts to put them in dialogue (29). Some scholars have called for the broad application of Gilroy's theoretical framework to analyses of regions beyond the scope of his original study. Others have explored what they see as the limitations of his postnational viewpoint. Critics have also suggested that his book privileges male intellectuals from Europe and the United States. Varied as they are, most of these responses, like Gilroy's book, focus on the Anglophone world.The articles included in this special issue reveal how consideration of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world can and must inflect our understandings of the literatures, cultures, and societies of the black Atlantic. They attend to the ways that colonialism, and especially structures of racial domination, impact the Afro-diasporic cultures of the Luso-African and Afro–Latin American Atlantic world. They thus extend what has been a highly productive dialogue beyond Anglophone cultures and address a surprising gap in comparative research on the cultures of the African diaspora, since more than ten times as many Africans were forcibly taken to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas than to the United States.2Modernity and double consciousness are global experiences that began early for the women, men, and children enslaved and colonized by Spain and Portugal.3 In this sense, studies of the black Atlantic in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world touch on the complex dynamics of colonialism, empire formation, transnationalism, diasporic subjecthood, and the geopolitics of knowledge.4 Latin American, Caribbean, and African ex-colonies share in their black Atlantic creole formations similar sociohistorical configurations, including myths of racial democracy, the imaginaries of tropicalism and Lusotropicalism, an insular-peripheral condition, and the agency of black populations that struggle against institutionalized racism for recognition. Double consciousness in these racial formations, as well as in their transnational global enclaves, remains connected to what Frantz Fanon defined as “being in the world,” a triple condition wherein subjectivity, space, and skin create similar but distinct challenges for different local Afro-diasporic populations.5We open the volume with Rubén Sánchez-Godoy's essay on Cabello Balboa's Verdadera descripción de la provincia de Esmeraldas (1583), which exemplifies the complex layering of early colonial configurations of race, bodies, and maroon cultures in Latin America. With his reading of Cabello Balboa's text as a painful inscription of conflictive events, Sánchez-Godoy examines the role of writing in the formation of early Spanish America. Exploring the ways a text produced from a Spanish/Christian point of view overruns its colonizing intentions, he exposes how the Afro-Amerindian maroon community of Esmeraldas claims its existence in relation to Spanish colonial authority and its mechanisms of objectification and domination.Guillermina de Ferrari adds another perspective on the constitution of community in the wake of slavery by placing Gilroy's metaphor of the slave ship in dialogue with Edouard Glissant's theories of relation as expressed through the metaphor of the plantation. The two metaphors suggest concepts of forced togetherness that lead her to interrogate notions of community, consensus, and lived experience in a comparative reading of the writings of three Caribbean authors: Puerto Rican Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Haitian Lyonel Trouillot, and Trinidadian Earl Lovelace. These works express what de Ferrari defines, following philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, as a new ethics of relation that refers to poetics as a form of agency for contemporary Caribbean subjectivities.Introducing a North/South perspective, Luiza Franco Moreira interrogates the role of black Atlantic musical expression in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Juxtaposing the work of Alain Locke, Alejo Carpentier, and Mário de Andrade, she sheds light on the transnational modernities and complex perspectives on race and culture that shape black Atlantic avant-garde movements. Moreira highlights the similarities their writings show in the distinctions they draw between “popular” and “erudite” culture and in their recourse to the modernist language of primitivism. She argues that Carpentier and Andrade understand the tensions between “black” and “white” musical traditions as formative in a way that Locke does not, thus signaling a significant difference between constructions of blackness and whiteness in the United States and Latin America.Rodrigo Lopes de Barros's paper touches on the other side of the avant-garde movements in Cuba and Brazil by focusing on discourses of eugenics and criminology and the way they engage with European scientific racism. Black bodies and their interactions with “the magic of African religions” were a central concern for the vanguardist movements of the early twentieth century and are the focus of the work of Cuban essayist Fernando Ortiz. Barros illustrates how spiritism, African religions, and race converge to form a complex view of racism and culture in Ortiz's writings that helps break down overly narrow national interpretations of Caribbean and Latin American cultures.Transnationalism in the avant-garde was related, as we see in the black Atlantic, with notions of movement and migration and in the definitions of creole cultures and nationalism. The local was configured as a form of translocal experience.6 These processes of creolization and configuration of national cultures are present throughout Atlantic cultures, as is made clear in Brady Smith's essay on Baltasar Lopes's novel Chiquinho (1947). In Chiquinho, Lopes foregrounds the sociopolitical issues of Cape Verdean society—poverty, drought, and finally migration—to describe what he sees as an insular condition. Insularity and colonialism redefine a form of double consciousness that is similar to and different from Gilroy's definition. It differs because it describes local histories and mestiço racial ideologies in Cape Verdean crioulo society. It is similar because it touches on the economic global racial formations informed by the colonial experience and the foreclosure of the human condition.While Smith's primary focus in Lopes's novel is the crisis of masculinity, a trope that engages with Gilroy's depictions of double consciousness, Perisic takes up the question of diaspora in the texts of Afro-Brazilian women writers published in the bilingual anthology Enfim … Nós/Finally … Us (1994), edited by Miriam Alves and Carolyn Richardson Durham. Following Brent Hayes Edwards's notion of bricolage, Perisic points to the generative slippages that arise when translations are juxtaposed in the printed text. She traces the relationships between gender, nation, and diaspora in this poetry as it confronts racist and sexist stereotypes. Her essay elucidates the ways Afro-Brazilian women authors challenge the exclusive association of authorship and canonization with masculinity and bring to the fore their own experiences as embodied political subjects.We close the volume with Judie Newman's analysis of Afro-British author Bernadine Evaristo's Blonde Roots (2009). Evaristo's novel, through its inversion of race in the master-slave relationship, forces the reader to consider the ways global racial formations cross over colonial/postcolonial histories to redefine ideology and power. Newman's work explores the normalization of racial hierarchies while providing us with a glimpse of the ways globalization is defining a new politics of empire that frame the English as well as the Spanish, Portuguese and French black Atlantic. Evaristo's satirical spin on racial hierarchies reminds us of Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter's proposition: “We must now replicate Columbus' creation of a ‘new image of the earth’ by creating a new ‘image of the human,’ based on a trans-racial mode of inclusive altruism, beyond the limits of the national subject and the nation-state.”7 Luso-African and Afro-Latin American populations in the Atlantic world have been historically and are today forging these transnational solidarities in their artistic, social, and political manifestations. As editors, we expect the essays in this volume to contribute to a critical dialogue on the importance of Afro-diasporic populations in the black Atlantic world and of their ethical contributions to humanity as they seek an egalitarian future.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2012-05-08

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Feminist Insurrections: From Queiroz and Castellanos to Morejón, Poniatowska, Valenzuela, and Eltit

  2008-04-15

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• National Space as Minor Space

  2005-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An Interview with Fernando Conceição

  Callaloo · 2002-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Callaloo - Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2002

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jossianna Arroyo

  2 shared

• Oralia Preble-Niemi

  1 shared

• Jossianna Arroyo Martinez

  1 shared

• Francine Masiello

  1 shared

• Fernando Conceição

  Universidade Federal da Bahia

  1 shared

Labs

• Gender StudiesPI

Awards & honors

• 2005 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award