Education

Biography

Shanya Cordis, Ph.D.,is a first-generation Black and indigenous (Lokono/Warau) Guyanese-American, whose interests focus on indigeneity across the Americas and the Caribbean, black and indigenous political subjectivities and resistance, transnational black and indigenous feminisms, and critical feminist geographies.

Her forthcoming book, “Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana” is a critical feminist ethnography that tracks how geographies of racial difference undergird indigenous recognition policies, extractive economies, and neocolonial capitalism, advancing the annexation of indigenous territories and entrenching antiblack displacement.
Secondly, "Unsettling Geographies" introduces relational difference, a theoretical framework which captures the social and political entanglements of the afterlives of slavery, conquest, and indentureship and its constitutively gendered and sexualized nature. Through an intersectional analysis of the racial and sexual imaginaries of the body—namely African, Amerindian, and Indian women— this book also traces how gendered violence is relationally configured and central to colonial capitalist expansion disrupting narratives that depict structural forces of dispossession as merely postcolonial remnants or nationalistic struggles.

In addition to her research, Dr. Cordis is deeply invested in cultivating collaborative black and indigenous feminist praxis, both in and out of the classroom, to generate more expansive visions of black and indigenous liberation and autonomy. Critical black and indigenous feminisms offer a vital way to analyze movement(s) toward more transformative and decolonial futures, emphasizing how multiple axis of power—heteropatriarchy, racism, capitalism, and colonialism — work together to structure our societies.

As part of imagining and co-creating other ways of being in the world, she explores and incorporates poetry and other performative arts into her scholarship and pedagogy. As part of her teaching practice, she aims to incorporate teaching methods that cohere theory and praxis and bring the insights of interdisciplinary anthropological research to students’ embodied lived experience. The classroom, beyond being a site of institutional socialization, is as a space for liberatory transformation, challenging students to not only be cognizant of why social inequities persist, but also to imagine and create pathways toward addressing them in their respective avenues of study/interest.

Courses Taught

Introduction to Anthropology ANT 203
Critical Feminist Geographies ANT 309
The Afterlives of Black & Indigenous Dispossession ANT 411
Anthropological Theory ANT 320
Decolonizing Anthropology ANT 430

Publications

Select Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

2019  “On Relational Difference: Antiblackness and Gendered Dispossession in Guyana.” Small Axe 60 (November 2019). 

2017    Berry, Maya, Claudia Chávez, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Ruth Velasquez “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology Journal, 32(4) November 2017.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

2019   “Push Ya Body: Imaginaries of the ‘Bush’ and the Amerindian Body in the Guyanese State,” In Unmasking the State: Politics, Society, and Economy in Guyana, 1992-2015 edited by Trotz, Alissa and Arif Bulkan. Ian Randle Publishers.

Public Scholarship

2018 Cordis, Shanya. “Sovereign (In)capacity: Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Futures.” Public Seminar website, September 6, 2018. http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/09/sovereign-incapacity/

2018  Cordis, Shanya and Sarah Ihmoud. 2018. “Reflections on the Limitations and Liberatory Potential of Feminist Anthropology (Part One).” Anthropology News website, May 4, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.844