Office: Keezell
219
Phone: 540-568-7058
Email: smithbma@jmu.edu
Office Hours: Fall 2009, TT 12:30-2:00, Wed 3:00-5:00
Courses: Fall 2009
GENG 260: Survey of African American Literature, TT 11:00-12:15
ENG 431 Studies in Caribbean Literature,TT 5:00-6:15
HON 300 Caribbean Lit and Culture
Education:
Stuyvesant High School, New York City
BA, Queens College - City University of New York [Minor in French: CUNY Study Abroad at Universitié de Paris VIII- Saint Denis]
MA, University of Virginia
Ph.D., University of Virginia
Awards:
Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty Career Enhancement Fellowship 2007-08
Social Science Research Council/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Grant
Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow, UVA
Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Queens College
Courses:
Past Courses:
GAMST 200 - Introduction to American Studies
ENG 361 - African American Fiction Writers
ENG 672 - Studies in African American Literature
ENG 673 – Studies in Caribbean Literature
Specialties:
My Sisters' Story (unpublished dissertation, University of Virginia 2002) examined how women novelists of the African diaspora (“Black Atlantic”) create communities in their writing. Beginning in the 19th century with the American slave narrative (Harriets Jacobs and Wilson), the discussion then moves to Zora Neale Hurston, Michelle Cliff and Paule Marshall in the matrices of Caribbean diaspora before concluding with new African beginnings—Mariama Bȃ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria) and Tsitsi Dangaremba (Zimbabwe). I theorized that these works from the US, Caribbean and Africa were “trans/formations” of politics and genre. These writings simultaneously formed diaspora as a transnational community identity and transformed literary traditions and genres, particularly by building autobiographical narration on drama rather than fiction's model.
Research interests include African diaspora fiction and autobiography; sci-fi; im/migration narratives; English-, French- and Spanish-language rap music; hip hop cultural formations and politics
Publications:
Carnival of the Spirit is a thematic, interdisciplinary examination of the poetics of the Trinidad Carnival (book in progress).
"'Colored from all Over Creation': The Diaspora Subject in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and The Fisher King,” in The Caribbean Woman Writer As Scholar: Imagining/Theorizing/Creating. (Caribbean Studies Press, forthcoming 2009)
"Reading in Circles: Representing Sexuality and/as History in Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem" in Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters (1995)
Review of Michael Eric Dyson's Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism in Callaloo (1994)
"Discovering the Tomb of Victor Sejour," AfrAm Newsletter, Centre d'Etudes Afro-Americaines et des
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