Chad Infante

Chad B. Infante is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Jamaica and studies Black and Indigenous U.S. and Caribbean literatures, film, and cultures. Chad has published the essays “Colonial Metaphor, Colonial Metaphysics: On the Poetic Pairing of Blackness and Indianness” in Diacritics and “Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies” with American Indian Quarterly. His book manuscript Murderous Feeling: Gender and Retribution in Black and Indigenous Literature is forthcoming on April 28th, 2026, with the University of Minnesota Press. This study explores representations of anticolonial murder, vengeance, and revenge in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response to colonial violence, a way to read Black and Native literature together, and as a desire for a feminist and queer rendition of revolution.

He is currently working on his second book, Play: a Racial and Social History of Children’s Television. This project reads the history of children’s television and film through the intersection of Black and Native American Studies. The book draws on UMD’s rich archival holdings in Sesame Street, The Electric Company and public broadcasting and on the alumni legacies of Jim Henson (The Muppets & Sesame Street), Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks). The book explores how racial images in children’s media—from the birth of animated cartoons in the 1920s to educational television programs of the 1970s to the age of the internet—both positively and negatively impacts the growth, play, and joy of the imagination for Black, Indigenous and White children in the United States.