José Buscaglia

As a critic of ideologies and social institutions in the Atlantic World, José F. Buscaglia’s work deals primarily with the history of ideas and collective memory, focusing on the political imaginary and the discourse on the human body in the making of the public sphere and the allocation of citizenship rights.

One of Buscaglia’s long-standing research interests has been the ideology of racialism and the way in which the false idea of the existence of races has historically influenced and continues to inform power relations on a global scale. In Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (2003) Buscaglia coined the term “mulataje” as a way of thinking and being that, since the 16th Century, has continually challenged and attempted to outmaneuver the discourse of racialist ideology and its mechanisms of labor control. In the book he also advocates for the use of the term Usonian to refer to the peoples, nationalist ideology and imperial traditions of the United States of America.

His most recent books are critical editions of the curious story of piracy and captivity written in Mexico City in 1690 by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. Of particular interest is the first bilingual edition of the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez/Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (Rutgers University Press, 2019). In these critical editions Buscaglia carefully documents how Alonso Ramírez was the first American known to have completed a full circumnavigation of the globe.