Danielle Roper is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Portuguese and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Her work on racial and queer performance, feminist activism, and racial formation in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe. Her first book Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas was written with the support of the Neubauer Family Assistant Fellowship and is forthcoming with Duke University Press (May 2025).
Hemispheric Blackface is a cultural study of blackface performance and its relationship to twentieth- and twenty first- century discourses of mestizaje, creole nationalism and other myths of racial democracy in the Americas. Challenging both the dominance of the US minstrel tradition and the focus on the nation in blackface studies, the book maps a hemispheric network of racial impersonation in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Jamaica, Cuba, and Miami to show how blackface remains embedded in all cultural entertainment. Contending that the Americas is linked by repeating nationalist fictions of postracialism, colorblindness, and myths of racial democracy, it assesses how blackface performance mediates the ongoing power of these narratives in moments of new political articulation. It examines blackface performance in the aftermath of the turn to multiculturalism in Latin America, the emergence of modern blackness in Jamaica, and the rise of Barack Obama in the United States. Instead of theorizing blackface as oppressive or liberatory, the book analyzes different domains of racial enjoyment: subjection, ambivalence, resistance, and even black enjoyment of blackface tropes. It shows how people use blackface performance to make sense of the advancements and reversals in racial equality taking place around them.
Roper is also the curator of the visual exhibit Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on U.S imperialism and cultural practice, on theatre, performance, constructs of afro-latinidad, and feminist theory in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the director of the series “Conversations in Hemispheric Performance” and former co-organizer of the working group for Slavery and Visual Culture at the University of Chicago. Roper appears as a pundit on current affairs in Latin America on local radio and television shows across the Americas. She was also the Thomas J. Watson fellow in 2006. She is currently completing her second book Racial Reckoning: Black Performance and Visual Art in the Caribbean and its Diasporas. Roper is from Kingston, Jamaica.
Recent Courses in RLL
- SPAN 22003 Introducción a las literaturas hispánicas: textos hispanoamericanos del modernismo al presente (Winter 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021)
- SPAN 22005 Latin American Literatures and Cultures: 20th and 21st Centuries (Spring 2023, Winter 2024, Winter 2025)
- SPAN 25660/35660 US Imperialism and Cultural Practice in Latin America (Spring 2020, Autumn 2024)
- SPAN 26780 Caribbean Music, Performance, and Popular Culture in the Age of Precarity: 1990 to the Present (Winter 2025)
- SPAN 29117/39117 Theater and Performance in Latin America (Winter 2017, Spring 2018, Winter 2019, Autumn 2020, Autumn 2023)
- SPAN 29700 Readings in Special Topics (Spring 2024)
- SPAN 33950 Latin American Women Perform (Winter 2020)
- SPAN 35500 New Directions in Afro-Latin Performance (Autumn 2018, Spring 2021, Winter 2024)