Juan Carlos Fermin

Biography

Juan Carlos “JC” Fermin is an English PhD candidate in the University of California, Irvine. In 2017, he received BAs in Comparative Literature, English, and Philosophy from California State University, Fullerton. JC focuses on literatures from the Global South and the Philippine Diaspora, but has also become an avid student of Afropessimism, Decolonial Feminisms, and Non-Western Radical Traditions. JC is invested in evocative forms of cultural production precipitated by crisis and revolution, as well as the relationship between these movements and insurrectionary violence. To mount immanent critiques of structural power and accompanying regimes of violence, JC believes in the primacy of literature as a window into worlds, with critical theory as a lens for understanding them. JC’s scholarship has been published in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies (2021), International Labor and Working-Class History (2023), and Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States (forthcoming). In his dissertation, JC strives to dissect literary and cultural manifestations of imperial ideology, even across consciously egalitarian texts. JC aspires to build a framework capacious enough to stretch from imperial ideology in the early modern period, such as the hierarchization of racial forms that flourished concomitantly with colonial conquest, to the contemporary survival of imperial ideology in neoliberal governance.