Overview
Joseph Isaac Miranda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University and a Ford Dissertation Fellow. His teaching and research interests converge around post-1960s Latinx literature and culture, queer of color critique, and performance and media studies. His dissertation, “Browning Out: Suspended Relations in Latinx Aesthetics,” uses contemporary Latinx literature and visual media to look at the underexamined aesthetic stakes and political implications of the Insular Cases on the management of US difference over the 20th century (Spanish-American War, mid-century Liberation Movements, end of the Bracero Program, the AIDS crisis). He connects these seemingly disparate state relations to highlight the abeyed forms of belonging (withheld sovereignty, limited mobility, and suspended self-possession) that concepts of the nation and citizenship offer Latinx. He argues contemporary Latinx creatives (Manuel Muñoz, Tanya Saracho, Justin Torres) experiment with a set of genres (bildungsroman, televisual realism, linked stories) and aesthetic practices (montage, collage, fragmentation, ensemble) to depict the alternative structures of obligation that flourish without state recognition and outside categories of citizen, nation, or heteronormative family.
Joseph has been a Shin Yong-Jin Fellow (2021), the co-organizer of “In/Difference: A Queer of Color Speaker Series” and a founding member of the endowed Institute for Comparative Modernities reading group, “Bound.” His writing on Latinx literature and culture is forthcoming in Atravesados: Essays on Queer Latinx Young Adult Literature.