My research interests focus on the formation and reproduction of social hierarchies and political identities in the United States and, more recently, in the Caribbean. My present work examines the impact of globalization (e.g., the expansion of the tourist and export processing industries) on social structures and cultural practices in the Dominican Republic. One line of inquiry that I am pursuing through this work concerns the relationship between processes of neoliberal, economic restructuring and the (re) articulation of sex/gender and racial hierarchies, relations and discourses, particularly within the rapidly expanding tourist sector. A second and related set of issues concerns the socioeconomic strategies and cultural practices through which Dominican and Haitian workers in the informal and, in some respects, illicit economy interpret, negotiate as well as resist the economic imperatives and cultural logic of globalization and its promise of modernity.

Representative Publications:

1992. "Voodoo, Ethnography and the American Occupation of Haiti: William Seabrook's The Magic Island." In Christine Gailey, ed. The Politics of Culture and Creativity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

1994. "Race, Identity and Political Activism: the Shifting Contours of the African American Public Sphere." Public Culture 7(1):147164.

1994. Race, coedited with Roger Sanjek. Rutgers: Rutgers University.

1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton: Princeton University.

2000. Santeria in New York City: A Study in Cultural Resistance. New York: Garland Publishers.