Carlos Rivera Santana

Carlos Rivera Santana is a Caribbean and Indigenous cultural studies scholar specializing in visual culture and decolonial theories. He critically examines histories of colonization and looks at their counter-discourses seen in Global South knowledges expressed in visual culture and literature, especially those produced from Indigenous ancestral worldviews and Caribbean/Puerto Rican cultural production. Rivera Santana was based in Australia for over seven years where he completed his PhD and was a lecturer specializing in global Indigenous and postcolonial studies at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as in Cultural Studies, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, and Third Text, and is the author of the book, Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics (2022, paperback) within the series of “Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics”.

Before Rivera Santana joined William & Mary he was at CENTRO, Hunter College at CUNY, where he was a research associate looking at decolonial Puerto Rican and Latinx contemporary art.

Ph.D., The University of Queensland; M.A./B.A., University of Puerto Rico.