Rachel Price

Rachel Price is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work focuses on Latin American, Iberian Atlantic, and particularly Cuban literature and culture. She is the author of The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 (Northwestern University Press, 2014) and Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (Verso Books, 2015).

At Radcliffe, she is working on “Aesthetic Archives of Cuba’s Second Slavery,” which radically recasts Cuban 19th-century media and arts, illuminating their inseparability from racialized slavery and importation of African captives during the 1830s–1850s. Although half a million Africans arrived in Cuba between 1805 and 1845, the island’s polyglot soundscape and multifarious aesthetic traditions barely enter canonical literature and art. “Aesthetic Archives” explores a wholly different archive of art, one that emerges in papers confiscated by Cuba’s Military Commission, court transcriptions of West African languages, and descriptions of period visual culture and performances.

Price cocurated the online experimental exhibition Waldemar Cordeiro: Bits of the Planet and the exhibition Cool War: Game Art across the Straits at Fanguito Studio (2015) and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam (2016), both in Havana, Cuba. In addition to academic articles, she has written catalog essays for the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Ludwig Forum Aachen and reviews, interviews, and articles for Art in America, Frieze, Public Books, and Texte zur Kunst. She received her BA from Yale University and her PhD from Duke University’s Program in Literature.