José Buscaglia, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies Education, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
José F. Buscaglia is a philosopher, university administrator, and consultant.
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Biography
José F. Buscaglia is a philosopher, university administrator, and consultant. Deeply trans-disciplinary, his work deals primarily with the history of ideas and social institutions, the discourse on the human body in theorizing the public sphere and citizenship rights, as well as exploring questions of historical memory and the political imaginary in the Atlantic World. One of his long-standing interests is the ideology of racialism and the institutional persistence of the concept of race as it continues to inform power relations on a global scale. More recently he has been focusing on reclaiming supra-national formulations for rethinking geo-political possibilities and citizenship rights in the Greater Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere.
In Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (2003) Buscaglia coined the neologism of “mulataje” as a practice of thinking and being that, since the 16th Century, has continuously attempted to undo the calculations of racialist ideology and its mechanisms of labor control and social policing. He has also reclaimed the term “Usonian” to refer to the peoples, nationalist ideologies and neo-imperial tradition of the United States of America. His most recent book is a critical edition of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1690 account of piracy and captivity, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (2011).
Buscaglia is the former director of the University of Havana-University at Buffalo MA Program in Caribbean Cultural Studies (2002-2014).
Areas of Expertise (4)
Greater Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere
Social Institutions and Power Relations
Social and Community
Citizenship Rights
Accomplishments (1)
2013 Nicolás Gullén Price for Philosophical Literature (professional)
Bestowed by the Caribbean Philosophical Association
Education (1)
SUNY at Buffalo: Ph.D., Comparative Literature
Affiliations (3)
- College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University : Director
- Latin American Studies Association
- Caribbean Studies Association
Links (3)
Media Appearances (5)
Cuba Is Getting a New President. But That Doesn’t Mean the End of Castro Rule
News @ Northeastern online
2018-04-20
Raul Castro’s decision step aside as Cuba’s president was met with great fanfare, but the move does not mean the end of 59-years of Castro rule over the island. Caribbean scholar Jose Buscaglia, a pioneer in Cuban studies since 1997, says Castro’s maneuver is designed to “hand the hot potato” of financial reform to his successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, while maintaining the real power for himself.
Catalonia will remain a part of Spain — for now
Vox online
2017-10-10
The man at the center of the political crisis ripping apart Spain has just attempted to pull off the impossible: both declaring that his native Catalonia has the right to secede from Spain and then immediately making clear that he wouldn’t actually be seceding. Instead, he asked to negotiate with the Spanish central government before demanding independence.
Catalonia vs. Spain
News @ Northeastern online
2017-10-06
Earlier this week, Catalonia’s government held a divisive independence referendum in which more than 90 percent of voters supported the push to leave Spain. Catalan President Carles Puigdemont indicated that he planned to declare independence from Spain at Monday’s session of the Catalan court. But Spain’s highest court might have thrown a wrench in those plans on Thursday, when it suspended the session in a bid to pre-empt a possible push for independence.
Anarchy in Venezuela
News @ Northeastern online
2017-08-03
Last weekend, Venezuela held an election to overhaul the country’s constitution—not, that is, a vote on whether to rewrite Venezuela’s framework document, but a vote on who would comprise the constituent assembly that would carry it out.
Northeastern’s Research Partnerships in Cuba Open the Doors to Scientific Exchange
News @ Northeastern online
2017-03-03
Northeastern faculty and administrators visited Cuba last week, with members of Congress, to expand upon the university’s academic and research partnerships there. Northeastern’s multifaceted set of initiatives in Cuba are paving the way for myriad research opportunities in areas such as coastal sustainability, tropical diseases, and the social sciences.
Articles (3)
Circumventing Racialism through Mulataje
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Lieterature
José F. Buscaglia-Salgado
2018 Mulataje is a neologism, reclaimed in 2003 in Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean by José F. Buscaglia-Salgado. Prior to this reclamation, the term was used sparingly and in a very limited way to refer to “racial mixing” in societies that were predominantly composed of Afro- and Euro-descendants in the Caribbean and Brazil. As such it was simply an adaptation and a synonym of mestizaje, used in the context of the Afro-diasporic populations of the Atlantic World. Conceptually reformulated, in its current acceptation, mulataje identifies a counterhegemonic culture that, since the earliest times in modernity, has moved against all colonialist calculations aimed at the possibility of moving beyond and leaving behind all things racial. As a most fundamental practice of being and of knowing informing individual self-conception and social action in the modern colonial world, mulataje speaks to the movements, great and small, individual and collective, that have attempted to outmaneuver all racial codes and racialist conventions as they have informed the distribution of labor and the allocation of natural resources and political rights past and present. Ultimately, the movement of mulataje points to the possibility of dethroning race as a valid and privileged category of knowledge.
Race as a weapon: defending the colonial plantation order in the name of civilization, 1791-1850
Culture and History Digital Journal
José F. Buscaglia-Salgado
2015 The object of this study is to analyze the use and adaptation of racialist ideology in the Afro-Hispanic Antilles following the start of the Revolution of Saint-Domingue in 1791, as it evolved to justify and reinforce plantation slavery and served to reinstitute and police the color line that was the central ideological premise supporting the economy of exchange and exploitation in the world of Atlantic coloniality. The renewed stigmatization of the racialized types in Creole population aimed to limit the echoes of the revolution against the plantation and it was an attempt to dismiss its political significance as a movement of self-emancipation and decolonization. The fear promoted by the colonial authorities, the planter class and Creole intellectuals, liberal and otherwise, aimed to establish a delicate balance between terror and profits wanting to justify the continuation of plantation slavery through the purposeful resemantization of the ideological tandem civilization/barbarity based on a racialized reading of history that championed European immigration and the systematic reduction of the population of Afro-descendants.
The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) and the Duplicitous Complicity between the Narrator, the Writer, and the Censor
Dissidences Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism
José F. Buscaglia-Salgado
2012 In 1690 a book containing an uncommon narrative managed to slip by the censors and was published in Mexico City under the title of Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez). Written by the well known mathematician, astronomer, and man of letters …