José Francisco Buscaglia

José Francisco Buscaglia is the author of important books and essays on the history of ideas and the institutions that inform the ideology of racialism, colonialism and caudillismo (tyranny) in the Antilles. Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) received the Nicolás Guillén Philosophical Literature Price, bestowed by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2013.  In this book Buscaglia coins the neologism mulataje to describe the ingenuity and culture that since the 16th century have challenged racialist machinations in the world of colonial modernity. It also proposes the use of the term Usonian to refer to the nationalist and imperial project of the United States of America.

Buscaglia has published two critical editions of Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (CSIC/Polifemo, 2011), Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez / The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (Rutgers University Press, 2019), a very curious pamphlet written by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and printed in Mexico City in 1690, which tells the story of the first American to circumnavigate the globe. In the critical essay that accompanies these works, Buscaglia finds in Ramirez's testimony, and in Sigüenza's complicity as interlocutor and validator, the first enunciation of a rebellious, piratical, and freedom-loving American thought which turns upside down the world that Ramirez had just rounded.