Enver Casimir

Ph.D. Student (ABD)
enverc@email.unc.edu

Major Field: Latin American and Caribbean History

Other Fields: Sport in society, Gender, African Diaspora, Race in U.S.
history, U.S.-Latin American relations

Advisor: Louis A. Pérez

Research Interests: My research interests center on the cultural and social history of 19th and 20th century Latin America, with a focus on the Caribbean. More specifically, I am concerned with racial ideology and conceptions of race and how these have evolved over time in response to historical circumstances. For comparative reasons, I also have an ancillary interest in the significance of race in North American (U.S.) history.

My current research project focuses on Afro-Cuban boxer Kid Chocolate, who boxed professionally in the 20s and 30s, became a national idol in Cuba and is still revered today as a founding member of the Cuban sports pantheon. I am using his career as a lens to examine how sports and racial ideology related to Cuban national aspiration and identity in the late 1920s and 1930s. My dissertation will argue that the origin of the strong connection between Cuban nationalism and sports preceded the triumph of the 1959 revolution, and is closely related to the prevalence of global ideological currents that linked athletic achievement to racial and national hierarchies in the first half of the twentieth century.