Thabisile Griffin

Thabisile Griffin is a historian, specializing in colonial insecurity, Black indigeneity, racialization, and the emergence of property in the Atlantic world. Her work examines periods of social and political instability to determine changing logics of differentiation and hierarchy—race-making, especially as it applied to African-descendant and native populations in the Caribbean. Her dissertation, entitled The Unmaking of St. Vincent: Colonial Insecurity and Black Indigeneity: 1780-1797, explores how the precarious conditions of colonial militias, nascent property logics, neglect from the metropole, legislation, and interior and exterior threats, all rendered frail the colonial settlement in and around the island. Her research reveals how changing racial, gender, and class rationalities were vital in attempting to maintain the colonial settlement, and also emphasizes the international and abolitionary nature of the Black indigenous militias against the colonial armies. Thabisile has published in various outlets, including The Funambulist, the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. She has lectured and presented her research at Yale, Columbia University, UCLA, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at UPenn. Thabisile is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship and California Humanities Grant recipient and has lectured and programmed for the Global Racisms and Ambedkar Initiative within the ICLS at Columbia University. She received her PhD from UCLA in 2021, and is now faculty at SCI-Arc, teaching classes on the history of property, the commons, the Caribbean and the emergence of market capitalism, and racialization in the Americas. Currently she is working on a manuscript on abolition, property, and internationalism in the anti-colonial Atlantic.