Ashley Agbasoga

Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga is a scholar and writer whose research interests include Black and Indigenous hemispheric feminisms, racialization (especially in settler-colonial regimes in Latin America), nation-state formation, foodways and geography. Her training at the intersections of Anthropology, Black Studies, Indigenous Studies and archival research continue to inform her teaching interests and academic work. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: the first contends with ongoing settler colonialism and mestizo nation-state formation during the shift to multiculturalism throughout Abya Yala/The Americas; the second connects the Black/Indigenous Pacific and Atlantic worlds through foodways. Both projects think with the rise of Afro-Indigenous and Black/Native visibility as a mode of unsettling foundational racial logics throughout the Americas.   Her previous work illuminates how women who identify as Black and Black-Indigenous engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and modern state formation in Mexico. Merging more than 15 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz and Mexico City with theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies, she argues that Black/Indigenous placemaking practices create two critical ruptures: first, in the (re)produced bifurcation of blackness and indigeneity, and second, in the Mexican state and the racialization of its territory as mestizo. Her work appears in an upcoming anthology of blackness in Latin America with University of Pittsburgh Press.   Before arriving at NYU, Agbasoga was a 2020-2022 Predoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at University of Virginia, as well as the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research Graduate Fellow at Northwestern University. Her work has also been generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Newberry Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and many others. Agbasoga is also a former organizer and proud CUNY alumna.