I was a guest at the University of Miami today, along with author Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel. Re-Imagining Haiti: from Revolution to Reconstruction.

We were invited by Dr. Patricia Saunders.

Professor Saunders’s research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. Her work has appeared inThe Bucknell Review, Calabash, Plantation Society in the Americas, The Journal of West Indian Literature and Small Axe. Her first book, titled Alien/Nation and Repatri(n)ation: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity will be published by Lexington Books in 2007. This book traces the emergence of literary nationalisms in the Anglophone Caribbean region while mapping these transformations through discourses of exile, national and sexual identity, and diaspora race politics in four cultural and political contexts: pre-independence Trinidad, post-independence Britain, the Civil rights era in the United States, and Canada. Other works in progress include an edited collection of essays on Jamaican popular culture and the politics of sexual and national identity. The essays in this collection explore critical aspects of dancehall culture and the points of intersection with global flows of capital, violence and culture.

Current project: Fusion and Con/Fusion: Gender, Sexuality, and Consumerism in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.