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About Alejandra Bronfman

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

NBN Episodes hosted by Alejandra:

Caribbean Studies May 24, 2022

Daylight Come

Diana McCaulay

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and …
Caribbean Studies April 27, 2022

The Lettered Barriada

Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
In The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke UP, 2021), Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated …
Caribbean Studies April 11, 2022

Haiti Fights Back

The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte

Yveline Alexis

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who …
Caribbean Studies March 30, 2022

Creolized Sexualities

Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean

Alison Donnell

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth …
Caribbean Studies February 4, 2022

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti

Vincent Joos

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Vincent Joos' book Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes …
Caribbean Studies November 19, 2021

Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean

Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970

Nicole C. Bourbonnais

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Over the course of the twentieth century, campaigns to increase access to modern birth control methods spread across the globe and fundamentally altered the way people thought about and mobilized …
Caribbean Studies March 26, 2021

Haiti's Paper War

Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954

Chelsea Stieber

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of …
Caribbean Studies February 16, 2021

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery

Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean

Daniel B. Rood

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age …
Caribbean Studies February 11, 2021

The Right to Live in Health

Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana

Daniel A. Rodríguez

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses …
Caribbean Studies January 6, 2021

Comrade Sister

Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution

Laurie R. Lambert

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
My conversation with Laurie Lambert, author of Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2020). This book asks us to rethink the Grenadan Revolution through the …
Caribbean Studies November 18, 2020

The Cuban Hustle

Culture, Politics, Everyday Life

Sujatha Fernandes

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke UP, 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but …
Caribbean Studies October 14, 2020

Audible Geographies in Latin America

Sounds of Race and Place

Dylon Robbins

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard …
Caribbean Studies September 2, 2020

The Greening of Saint Lucia

Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies

Brad Walters

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve …
Caribbean Studies July 13, 2020

Far From Mecca

Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Aliyah Khan

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in …
Caribbean Studies June 16, 2020

Beyond Coloniality

Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition

Aaron Kamugisha

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Aaron Kamugisha reads CLR James and Sylvia Wynter to glean from them ways to navigate the “beyond” of coloniality. In his new book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the …
Caribbean Studies May 27, 2020

The Yellow Demon of Fever

Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade

Manuel Barcia

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University …
Caribbean Studies February 4, 2020

Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

Roberto Strongman

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
In Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), Roberto Strongman reveals the many non-heteronormative texts, practices and beliefs though which Black Atlantic religious …
Caribbean Studies January 9, 2020

Aerial Imagination in Cuba

Stories from Above the Rooftops

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
In her new book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (Routledge, 2019), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier looks up at the sky, and from there she begins her stories about …
Caribbean Studies December 12, 2019

In the Forests of Freedom

The Fighting Maroons of Dominica

Lennox Honychurch

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Maroons—enslaved Africans who escaped and formed autonomous communities—dominated Dominica’s hilly interior for centuries. Dominica’s unusual history of a relatively brief period of colonization and few sugar plantations shaped a history …
Caribbean Studies October 9, 2019

Black British Migrants in Cuba

Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948

Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres' new book Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) invites readers to enter the world of …
Caribbean Studies September 23, 2019

The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad

Alexander Rocklin

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Beginning in the mid 19th century, thousands of indentured laborers traveled from India to the Caribbean, and many settled in Trinidad. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of …
Latin American Studies August 1, 2019

Makers of Democracy

A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia

A. Ricardo López-Pedreros

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
This tightly argued social and intellectual history of the middle classes in Colombia makes a compelling case for the importance of both transnationalism and gender in the mid-century idea of …
Caribbean Studies July 17, 2019

Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Carlos Garrido Castellano

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
A work of art about doing nothing; a work of art that invites people to take it apart; a work of art that consists of two people walking in a …
Caribbean Studies May 20, 2019

Erased

The Untold Story of the Panama Canal

Marixa Lasso

Hosted by Alejandra Bronfman
Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force …