Beaudelaine Pierre

B.A. Faculté des Science Humaines | L’Université d’État d’Haiti

Ph.D. University of Minnesota of Minnesota-Twin Cities

My research focuses on how African descended people across the diaspora narrate gender, politics, care, and accountability within the structures of colonialism, racial capitalism, and war. In accounting for feminist infrastructures capable of addressing Black lives, the environment, human rights, and immigrant and refugee justice concerns, my work attends to the less-than-human, the creole, the small, and the queer in knowledge production, social movements, and worldbuilding; emphasizing how Black, Indigenous, and people of color life-worlds construct our presents at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression.

My book project “Tout Moun Se Moun: Experiments in Beings” sits with the imaginaire of Haitians living under Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) who reconstitute familiar and unfamiliar modes of living as they withstand violence and loss and death both in their native Haiti and in the United States. Centrally focusing on how TPS holders shape our understanding of systemic violence of racism, homophobia, and economic dehumanization across Haitian communities in Haiti and in the United States, this project conjures a Black feminist vision of what it means to be human that rejects the colonial politics of personhood.

As a Creative writer, the question I urge upon myself is how I might tremble with the disjointed, the far, the unlanguaged, the collages of ordinary, everyday intimacies, to experiment with ways to think/feel/desire/play/relate in a world always in tremor. The Rasanbleman Literè Kreyòl I curate, annually, with the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa-- and gathering Creole and diasporic writers from countries around the world— also works as a literary tapestry of creative, responsive, collective worlds in critical, transnational connections and solidarities.