Joseph Miranda

Joseph Isaac Miranda is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University and an affiliate faculty member of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

 

He is currently completing his first book project, How to Mourn a Fiction: Latinidad and the Law of Underdevelopment, which reconsiders Latino literature’s enduring attachment to narratives of development. Rather than treating such narratives as testimony to individual projects of political recognition, belonging, or justice, the book argues that the genre’s centrality contradictorily reifies the logics that produce Latino racialization in the first place. Beginning with the Insular Cases, it traces how imperial doctrines of deferred incorporation and perpetual pupilage structure Latino literary form, identity politics, and field formation post 1968. Drawing on psychoanalysis, legal history, and queer of color critique, the project shifts attention away from understanding latinidad as the effect of pathologizing discourse, demographic fact, or utopian collective coherence and toward the formal contradictions—development, analogy, seriality, and melancholia—that desire, imagine, sustain, and unsettle collective life.

 

His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and has received the MELUS Katharine Newman Best Essay Award and an honorable mention for the Crompton-Knoll Best Essay Prize from the GLQ caucus of the MLA and the American Studies Q/T Caucus. His writing appears in MELUS Journal and American Literature, among other venues.