Assistant Professor, French
About
My research and teaching focus on francophone Caribbean and African literature, with interdisciplinary specializations in Afro-diasporic literary and cultural movements, and slavery in the French Atlantic. I am particularly interested in the ways that people of African descent in the francophone world have contributed to notions of citizenship and freedom on a global scale. My book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of black women in the French empire. It shows the ways that their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even francophone borders, black French women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging. I am currently at work on a second book that examines notions of freedom in enslaved people’s life writing in French.
Books
Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
Selected Articles
“The Spectacle of Belonging: Henri Bergson’s ‘Comic Negro’ and the (Im)possibility of Place in the Metropole” in Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson, eds. Andrea Pitts and Mark Westmoreland, SUNY Press, 2019.
“Mobility and the Enunciation of Freedom in Urban Saint-Domingue.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.2 (2017): 213-229.
“Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Césaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 20.2 (2016): 1-13.
“Creolizing Freedom: French-Creole Translations of Liberty and Equality in the Haitian Revolution.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 36.1 (2015): 111-123.
Recent graduate courses taught
Black Internationalism
Recent undergraduate courses taught
Black France
Mapping the French Atlantic
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Research Areas & Interests
- Francophone Caribbean and African literature
- Literature and culture of the African Diaspora
- Transnational Black feminisms
- Slavery in the French Atlantic
- Digital mapping and visualization
