Professor Allen, jointly appointed with the Department of African American Studies and Anthropology Department, works at the intersecions of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness – in Cuba, the US and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.
Dr. Allen’s critical ethnography Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2011], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis – most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans - to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, reinterpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” His current research project, Black Queer Here and There: Movement and Sociality in the Americas, traces cultural and political circuits of transnational queer desire- in travel, tourism, (im)migration, art and activism.
He can be contacted at jafari.allen@yale.edu.