Dr Isar Godreau
Dr Isar Godreau holds a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology. She is a researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. Her research focuses on issues of “race” and cultural nationalism, racism, racial discrimination and identity in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Godreau has published on the impact of current austerity measures on public higher education in Puerto Rico after hurricane María. She is the author of Arrancando mitos de raíz: guía para la enseñanza antirracista de la herencia africana en Puerto Rico (2013) (Pullying Myths from the Root: Guide for an antiracist pedagogy about the African heritage in Puerto Rico) and Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico (2015 University of Illinois Press) which received the Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) in 2016.
CaribOx Visit
During the CaribOx Visiting Fellowship, I worked on disseminating findings from Visualizando la Afrodignidad, a project that identifies Eurocentric and colonial legacies in how Puerto Rican school textbooks represent slavery and Afro-descendant history. The findings reveal that Puerto Rican history textbooks privilege narratives of victimization, obscure Black agency, reinforce Eurocentric beauty standards, and disconnect slavery from present-day racial inequality. The fellowship gave me an incredibly valuable opportunity to share this work and advance the accompanying book, which develops these findings into a full-length manuscript. While at Oxford, I networked with colleagues from around the world, gave three presentations, and wrote three chapters of the book.
