“Writing Selves, Citizen Others: Black Victorians and the Trope of the ‘sea kaffir’ in South African Literature”
108 Bruen Street Newark, NJ 07105
Brent Hayes Edwards
My dissertation traces the figure of the ‘sea kaffir’ in Cape Town’s transnational black print culture before apartheid and charts its emergence in the South African novel. I argue that the Victorian liberal Empire offered a map of the world in which a black liberation politics outside of the nation-state was possible I attend to the discursive space afforded non-European subjects by the Victorian Empire to critique citizenship and black male leadership/heroism in Africa. Also, I consider the ways in which the sea kaffir was subject to scientific racism, fetishization and panic around his sexuality.
Columbia University, University Writing Program Instructor, University Writing: Intellectual Practice, 2006 – 2011 Barnard College, English Department Teacher’s Assistant, Home to Harlem, 2008 Columbia University, Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race Teaching and Research Fellow, 2007 – 2008 Introduction to Asian American Studies History of Racialization in the United States Introduction to the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature Teaching Assistant, Modern Comparative Fiction, 2006 Teaching Assistant, US Latino Literature, 2005
“‘A Native Venture’: Sol (Solomon Tshekisho) Plaatje, Defining South African Literature.” Special Issue of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. 21/22 (2010).
Mellon Mays Graduate Initiative, Preparing for the Professoriate (2011); Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (2011 - 2012); Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship (2004 – 2011); Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Merit Award (2009); Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Award (2004 – 2008); Kennedy Senior Thesis Prize (2003); Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (2001 – 2003)
Representative, Graduate Student Council (2007 - 2008)