The Manchineel Project: Call for Applicants Re-Opened

The Manchineel Project, the Diaspora Solidarities Lab’s newest microlab, is a multimedia and multimethod interrogation of whiteness in Caribbean moving images. Through various public programs designed around specific case studies, the project aims to create a living syllabus to better understand the intersections of race and cinema in the Caribbean and its diasporas. 

The manchineel, or manzanilla in Spanish, is a flowering plant native to tropical  zones of the Americas and considered to be the  most poisonous in the world.  Known as “the little apple  of death,” the fruit’s toxin is concentrated in its milky white flesh and sap. Due to its resemblance to the common baygrape, placards are often placed on its trunk to warn against the fruit’s consumption. 

Taking this practice as its foundational metaphor, the Manchineel Project intervenes in objects within which a toxic whiteness lies just beneath the surface. More than just sorting apples from grapes, the project is intended to instill in spectators a critical responsibility to confront pathologies of whiteness in Caribbean media in all of its forms.

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Diaspora Solidarities Laboratory (DSL) is a Black feminist multi-institutional partnership that links Black diasporic, archipelagic, and Indigenous knowledge communities invested in social justice, digital practice, and community organizing. DSL brings together the programming and faculty Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez (PI, MSU) and Jessica Marie Johnson (Co-PI, JHU) who lead Taller Electric Marronage, LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, and the Afro-Latinx Lab to create traditional and experimental scholarship interrogating thought around: ecologies (climate, archipelagos, geographies), care and pleasure (joy, relation, sexualities), solidarities (fugitivity, collaboration, strategy), and documentation (archives, interviews, testimonies). 

The solidarity fellow position is part-time wherein post-graduate, graduate, or undergraduate students will work within microlabs or on DSL-sponsored projects with the intention of complementing their own research or work. Fellows should strive to be excellent communicators, well-organized, team-oriented, and able to lead. The work requires they be able to coordinate with others in planning and implementing research programs, all while reflecting the Black feminist values of DSL.

To apply, please visit the link below and select the box next to The Manchineel Project/Proyecto Manzanilla.

Review of applications will begin Thursday, February 29th, 2024.
For more information, contact lab manager Dr. Pedro Noel Doreste at doreste@msu.edu.