New Publications by ES Graduate Students

Two graduate students in the ES program, Joshua Acosta and Luiza Bastos Lages, have recent publications. 

Acosta's article, "'The Island of Living Hope': Leprosy Eradication Publicity in the Late American Colonial Philippines," examines leprosy eradication discourses in the American colonial Philippines. It argues that narratives about leprosy treatment became a site for negotiating political claims over medical authority during heightened nationalist sentiment in the 1920s and 1930s. As Filipino physicians levied critiques of colonial public health efforts in addressing leprosy care, American colonial and humanitarian officials enlisted Filipino leprosy patient-inmates and physician collaborators as affective ambassadors to recapitulate a benevolent rendering of colonial medical interventions. These dynamics underscore how the framing of leprosy care was jointly constituted with the shifting political landscape during the latter decades of US rule.

Bastos Lages' article reads O Samba do crioulo doido, a solo performance by queer Afro-Brazilian artist Luiz de Abreu, as a theorization of how Brazil’s myth of racial democracy operates as an erotic fantasy grounded in Black subjection. The performance unsettles Brazil’s ideology of racial neutrality and its sadomasochistic disavowal of the violence that subtends the production of Blackness. By probing the nation’s familiar lust for Black flesh and gesturing toward quite different Black queer desires, O Samba corrodes the narrative of racial democracy—which sutures Brazilian representations of the nation and its subjects— while choreographing the radical possibilities of transient Black pleasures.

For more: 

Acosta, Joshua Gabriel. "'The Island of Living Hope': Leprosy Eradication Publicity in the Late American Colonial Philippines." Special issue on Health Messaging, Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 73, no. 4 (December 2025): 421-446.
Link:https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/146/article/978638.