Notable Students
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Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, theories of allegory, [1] [2] the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.
In 2014, she became the Chair of Gender Studies, and is also Professor of English and Comparative Literature. From 2017-2018, she was the Stuart Hall Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. [3] In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.
Sharpe was born in London, UK, and raised in Bombay, India. She a first generation-college graduate. Upon receiving her high school diploma, Sharpe became a flight attendant for Beirut-based Middle East Airlines, flying primarily throughout the Arab world. After coming to the United States, Sharpe settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where she worked in the stationery department at the local Woolworth's Department Store to save up enough money for college tuition, before enrolling at the University of Texas in Austin, in 1978.
After earning her BA, Sharpe was accepted to UT's PhD program in Comparative Literature where she met Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the founders of postcolonial and subaltern studies. [4] Spivak became her dissertation chair, and supervised Sharpe's doctoral thesis.
Sharpe teaches courses on postcolonial theory, Caribbean literature, memory studies, and narrative theory at UCLA.
She lives in Los Angeles.
Sharpe is author of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minnesota 1993), which provides historically-grounded readings of Anglo-Indian fiction for how representations of interracial rape helped manage a crisis in British colonial authority. Her book has been widely reviewed and is considered a classic in postcolonial studies. Her second book, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minnesota 2002), challenges the equation of subaltern agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine black women’s negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.
Sharpe has published widely on gender, the Black Atlantic and cultural theories of postcoloniality and globalization in Gender and History, Signs , Atlantic Studies, PMLA, and Meridians, among other journals. Her latest book, “Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss" was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. The book identifies a philosophy of history and a theory of the archive from Caribbean literature and art. [5]
Her published works include the books Allegories of Empire, [6] Ghosts of Slavery, [7] essays, [8] published interviews with Gayatri Spivak, and several edited volumes on postcolonial and Caribbean literature.
Select Publications
“What Use Is the Imagination?” PMLA 129: 3 (May 2014): 512-17.
“The Middle Passages of Black Migration.” Atlantic Studies 6: 1 (2009): 97-112.
“Plunder and Play: Éduoard Duval-Carrié’s Artistic Visions.” Callaloo 30: 2 (Summer 2007): 561-69.
“Cartographies of Globalisation, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.” Gender and History 15: 3 (2003): 439-58.
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-8166-3723-2
“‘Something Akin to Freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince.” differences 8: 1 (1996): 31-56.
Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0816620609
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Catachresis, originally meaning a semantic misuse or error—e.g., using "militate" for "mitigate", "chronic" for "severe", "travesty" for "tragedy", "anachronism" for "anomaly", "alibi" for "excuse", etc.—is also the name given to many different types of figures of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional usage.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries, originating from all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term Subaltern Studies is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who share many of their views and they are often considered to be "exemplary of postcolonial studies" and as one of the most influential movements in the field. Their anti-essentialist approach is one of history from below, focused more on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite.
Ranajit Guha was an Indian historian, who was one of the early pioneers of the Subaltern Studies group, a methodology of South Asian Studies focused on post-colonial and post-imperial societies, studying them from the perspective of the underclasses. He was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies and wrote extensively both in English and in Bengali.
Alterity is a philosophical and anthropological term meaning "otherness", that is, the "other of two". It is also increasingly being used in media to express something other than "sameness", or something outside of tradition or convention.
Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It refers to a political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity to represent themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily "essentialize" themselves, despite it being based on erroneous logic, and to bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, such as equal rights or antiglobalization.
Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy. She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published extensively on questions of post-colonial agency, film, Algeria, area studies, autobiography, Marxism, the visual and feminist theory. She received her Ph.D in 1993 from the University of York. She has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Utah, and in 2000 began teaching at Duke University, where she is Professor of English, Literature and Women's Studies. Her theorization of subjectivity and sovereignty, including her recent work on disposability, indignity and asylum, engages with the work of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Irigaray, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Spivak. From 2007 until 2015, she was the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, and in July 2017, she was appointed to be the incoming Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, both at Duke University.
Postcolonial international relations is a branch of scholarship that approaches the study of international relations (IR) using the critical lens of postcolonialism. This critique of IR theory suggests that mainstream IR scholarship does not adequately address the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on current day world politics. Despite using the language of post-, scholars of Postcolonial IR argue that the legacies of colonialism are ongoing, and that critiquing International Relations with this lens allows scholars to contextualize global events. By bridging postcolonialism and International Relations, scholars point to the process of globalization as a crucial point in both fields, due to the increases in global interactions and integration. Postcolonial IR focuses on the re-narrativization of global politics to create a balanced transnational understanding of colonial histories, and attempts to tie non-Western sources of thought into political praxis.
Françoise Lionnet serves as acting chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she is professor of Romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, and African and African American studies. She is distinguished research professor of comparative literature and French and Francophone studies at UCLA, and a research associate of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She served as director of the African Studies Center and Program Co-Director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective.
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures is a 1989 non-fiction book on postcolonialism, penned by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of postcolonial texts and their relationship with bigger issues of postcolonial culture, and is said to be one of the most significant and important works published in the field of postcolonialism. The writers debate on the relationships within postcolonial works, study the mighty forces acting on words in the postcolonial text, and prove how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of language and literature. First released in 1989, this book had a second edition published in 2002.
Ritu Birla is an historian of modern South Asia. She is an associate Professor of History and is formerly the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and former Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
The Telluride House, formally the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association (CBTA), and commonly referred to as just "Telluride", is a highly selective residential community of Cornell University students and faculty. Founded in 1910 by American industrialist L. L. Nunn, the house grants room and board scholarships to a number of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members affiliated with the university's various colleges and programs. A fully residential intellectual society, the Telluride House takes as its pillars democratic self-governance, communal living and intellectual inquiry. Students granted the house's scholarship are known as Telluride Scholars.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism,, and The Sage Handbook on Identities.
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a 2013 book by the Indian sociologist and New York University professor Vivek Chibber.
Ankhi Mukherjee is an academic specialising in Victorian and Modern English literature, critical theory and postcolonial and world literature. In 2015, she was appointed a Professor of English and World Literatures by the University of Oxford.
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