Ricardo A. Wilson II

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Overview

Ricardo Wilson received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California in 2015 and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies and the Society for the Humanities. His current book project, Toward the Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Radical Blackness, responds to a growing tendency to view the United States as moving toward a more fluid idea of race that characterizes, at least in the imaginary, many Latin American nations. By investigating the historical archive along side literature and film from the United States and Mexico, the project looks to articulate, from the perspectives of their respective national psychological apparatuses, the phenomenon of a disappearing radical blackness in postracial and multiracial discourses.

Languages Spoken:
English and Spanish

Research Focus

His research privileges twentieth and twenty-first-century literature and film from the Americas as a prism though which to explore the evacuation of language around contemporary issues of race.

Publications

  • “In the Blind: Alfonso Cuarón and the Question of Futurity,” CR: The New Centennial Review (forthcoming)
  • “Evidence for Baldwin,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 11, nos. 2-3 (2012): 88-93
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