José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia

José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (they/elle/ellx) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. They are a Chicanx artist and scholar from Sonoma, California. José received a B.A. Religion and Latin American/Latino Studies from Swarthmore College (2023), where they co-founded Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal. Their undergraduate thesis explored notions of nationalism, “high” art, and popular culture in La Más Draga, a Mexican drag reality competition. 

At UC Berkeley, José’s research broadly examines sonic/visual culture and performance in the Black Atlantic, focusing on the environment, gender, spirituality, and technology. They are developing a concept of “Black Tropicalia” to ask how queer/trans* Black artists question our contemporary relationships to technological advancement and eco-apocalypse. Orbiting around the concepts of “catastrophe” and “consumption,” they analyze aesthetic projects of critique against the Human. They argue that scholars and artists in Black studies challenge the posthumanist turn which is, perhaps, more closely related to the violence of humanism that it supposedly seeks to overcome. These artists question the liberatory potential of the posthuman or non-human, given the exclusive and violent relationship between the Black and the Human. José is interested, then, in what Blackness does to foundational Western categories like humanness, nature, and technology. Ultimately, they intervene in current scholarship on posthuman literary, sonic, and visual ecologies embedded in phenomena like science fiction and speculative media.