Overview
Angelica J. Allen is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Chapman University. She received her Ph.D. in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and holds an MA in Africana Studies from New York University. Her book project explores a community in the Philippines known as the Black Amerasians, a population born from the union of African American military men and Filipina women. As both a member of the Black Amerasian community and a scholar of that community’s experiences, Angelica’s goal is to develop a research project dedicated to advancing social justice by granting more visibility to Black Amerasian perspectives. She teaches courses on the Black Pacific, Black Feminisms, Africana Studies, and Filipinx American History. She is a visual artist and has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies.
Research Focus
Allen’s forthcoming monograph titled, Portraits of Afro-Amerasians in the Philippines is a critical ethnography that focuses on the lived experiences of a community in the Philippines known as the Black Amerasians (a population born from the unions of Black military men and Filipina women). It is an interdisciplinary project which incorporates historical analysis, autoethnography, and visual ethnography. It examines how Black Amerasians define their own identities and it describes the survival strategies enacted by this community against anti-Blackness. Despite their membership in one of the largest and oldest Amerasian diasporas, Black Amerasians remain one of the most unrecognized and under-researched communities to arise from the Philippines’ neo-colonial relationship to the United States. As a trans-disciplinary study, this study makes the following critical contributions across the disciplinary fields which include African Diaspora Studies, Asian American Studies, and the burgeoning subfields of Black Pacific Studies, Black Feminisms, and Filipinx American Studies, Visual Ethnography, and others.
