Joey Whitfield

Joey Whitfield

Joey Whitfield's doctoral thesis (Punitive Cultures of Latin America: Power, Resistance and the State in Representations of the Prison) was a comparative interrogation of the politics of Latin American prison writing from across Spanish and Portuguese speaking America. He is interested in non-canonical literary cultures of Latin America including crime narratives, Anarchist literature and testimonio. His theoretical interests lie in political ideology and hegemony, with a focus on masculinities, and the reception of Foucault in Latin America.

After finishing his PhD Joey worked as a Teaching Fellow in Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds where he has now taken up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to research the cultural politics of the 'war on drugs'. 

Conference papers

  • 'Marching Powder and Neoliberal Voyeurism' ((In)visibilities, CRASSH Cambridge 2013)
  • 'Subaltern Affects and Popular Representation in José León Sánchez' La isla de los hombres solos' (Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford 2013)
  • 'La isla de los hombres solos: becoming monster before the law'(Postgraduates in Latin American Studies, Oxford 2012)
  • 'Pleasure, resistance and male (homo)sexual subjectivity in Cuban prison literature: change and continuity' (Cuba Forum, Nottingham 2012)
  • 'Informal neoliberalism and market logics in the Bolivian prison experience' (Experiencing Prison, Prague 2012)
  • 'Testimonio as tourism' (Postgraduates in Latin American Studies, Cambridge 2011)
  • 'Roberto Bolaño: Nazis, Writers and the "Post-political"'(Netherlands Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Gröningen 2010)
  • 'Angola, Race and Aids: A symptomatic reading of Ernesto Santana's Bajo la luna negra' (Cuba Forum, Nottingham 2010)

Academic Publications

  • 'Narratives of Internationalism in Angola: Myths, testimonio, fiction' International Journal of Cuban Studies (Vol.2 numbers 3 & 4, Nov 2010)
  • Review: 'Draper, Susana. Afterlives of confinement: Spatial Transitions in PostdictatorshipLatin America' Forthcoming in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

Teaching

Joey supervised undergraduates on Twentieth Century Latin American Literature and Film for the department of Modern and Medieval Languages and also gave seminars and supervised research essays for MPhil students in the Centre of Latin American Studies. 

Other Work

Joey has translated stories by Venezuelan writer Carolina Lozada and José Luis Zárate and adapted and co-directed a film version of Jorge Luis Borges' story 'Death and the Compass'.