Dr. Angelique Nixon

Snippet: An innovative contribution to the field of Black Feminist Studies, this landmark collection brings together the most influential historical and contemporary thinkers in Black feminist theories across transnational contexts. Featuring ground-breaking new work alongside canonical essays from key thinkers, this book adopts a truly global approach to its subject. In doing so, it looks beyond North America to showcase a diverse range of continents and perspectives. The collection includes not only standard academic essays, but also vital statements, interviews, manifestoes, and creative work, which transmit and embody Black feminist thought. The book is broken up into five carefully curated sections:-Black Feminist Foundations-Statements and Manifestos-Cultures and Aesthetics-Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities-Black Feminist Futures Timely and important, this is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Black Studies, Women & Gender Studies and Black Feminist Studies, as well as more generally to American Studies, African Studies, Caribbean Studies, and African Diaspora Studies.

Publication/source: Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque, 2026

Description / abstract: Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region's dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque-spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic-to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people's sense of being. The authors reflect on" freeing up" as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

Publication/source: Rutgers University Press, 2026

Description / abstract: Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque—spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic—to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

Publication/source: Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2023

Description / abstract: Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature can be described as a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postcolonial island-nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean writers located inside and outside the region have long taken up the challenge of representing and affirming the complexity of the region's histories, languages, stories, myths, cultures, and identities. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genresnovels, poetry, essays, and playsand paid careful needed attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s to 1970s (namely,

Publication/source: The Black Scholar 51 (2), 71-74, 2021

Description / abstract: The driving force of the book is a positioning of Black and queer as one (of and in itself), which requires the reader to think deeply about the interconnections between queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty. Lara argues that we see and understand these as pivotal to the ongoing and unfinished project of decolonization. In other words, there is no freedom without self-determination and decolonial liberation, and there is no Black freedom without queer freedom. By using a colon in between “queer freedom: black sovereignty,” Lara insists