Volume 57 Issue 3 of the “Journal of Canadian Studies” features an article from Professor Professor Beauchemin. Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities explores the diasporic and queered possibilities of the Haitian Revolution with a focus on the revolutionary figure Romaine la Prophètesse. The article uncovers the liberatory potential of this historical figure’s gendered subjectivity through a radical interdisciplinarity approach.
Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities challenges traditional narratives and delves into the untold stories of resistance and creativity.
Bianca Beauchemin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies. She is currently working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.