Percy Hintzen

Biography

Specialties and Expertise
Comparative Political Sociology, Postcolonial Studies, Political and Economic Development, Caribbean Political-Economy, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Critical Methodology, Comparative Race and Ethnicity.

Research and Scholarship
Professor Hintzen receive his formal graduate training in comparative political sociology with a particular focus on political economy. He also holds an M.A. degree in international urbanization and public policy. His scholarship reflects his concern with the fraught conditions of upheaval brought about by globalized modern social formations (including modern forms of consciousness), their material manifestations, and their distortions. This is the focus of his current work in a manuscript titled The Black Modern Subject: Disapora, Modernity, Foreclosure, and Misrecognition. His substantive engagements are with i) the Caribbean, which he sees as the formative emplacement of modern social formations, or at least its conditions; ii) migration, which he sees as the condition out of which modern formations were forged through the “entanglements” that they necessitated; iii) Africa, Blackness and the African Disaspora as the spaces from which he chooses to engage with modern social formations and forms of consciousness; and iv) coloniality or colonial and post-colonial forms of commandment around which modernity has been formalized, legitimized, institutionalized, and normalized. His work reflects his concern with the entire global enterprise of colonialism that includes Europe and North America.

 

Research

Professor Hintzen’s research, scholarship, and scholarly practice is “trans-disciplinary” more than multi-disciplinary. It takes into account ways in which culture and institutions permeate, define, produce, and fashion every aspect of reality. He has authored what is considered to be one of the most significant and authoritative books on the racial politics in Guyana and Trinidad titled The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial mobilization, elite domination and control of the state in Guyana and Trinidad. He has also authored a book on West Indian immigrants to the United States titled West Indians in the West: Self-representations in an immigrant community. He has co-edited with Professor Jean Rahier of FIU a volume on black immigrants to the United States titled Problematizing Blackness: Self ethnographies by Black immigrants to the United States and a recent volume, Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora, also with Jean Rahier and Professor Filipe smith of Tulane University. He has published over fifty articles in journals and chapters in edited volumes on the political economy of the Caribbean and Africa, on West Indian immigration to the United States, and on issues of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. He has presented his research in over one hundred papers at conferences and other forums.