What are your research interests?
Postcolonial, Caribbean and Black British literatures and cultures. My research into Anglophone Caribbean literatures and cultures covers many things: sugar, tourism, sexuality, myth, writing, gender, food, history, race, orality, language, migrancy and diaspora. Caribbean literature is often neglected and my research has focused on recuperating less well known archives of writing and on making Caribbean literature more accessible (see for more detail, The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature). Not only is Caribbean literature a deeply historical literature which demands to be read in its cultural, economic and historical contexts but in its contemporary forms it is also richly diverse, exciting and ground-breaking, as Marlon James’ 2015 Booker prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings attests.
What was your last publication about?
My last publication was a chapter surveying Black British poetry since 1945 for the newly published Cambridge Companion to Post 1945 Poetry, edited by Ed Larrissy (CUP). It was a tough chapter to write as there are so many exciting poets around, including Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Dorothea Smartt, Grace Nichols, Karen Mcarthy-Woolf, Daljit Nagra, John Agard, Dean Atta – but I also needed to historicize the contemporary scene and show how there have been shifts between different generations of poets and the terms used to examine and to categorise their work.
What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am writing a monograph called Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean which examines Caribbean food cultures and the ways in which food, text and culture are linked in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas. It’s great fun as I get to explore food histories and foodways and look at texts as varied as cookbooks and literary texts. I’ve published on British entrepreneur, Levi Roots too though I’m not sure he’d enjoy my critique!
You can access another recent article by myself on food in Caribbean writing here.
Which modules are you teaching on this year? (UG & MA level)
Canonicity: Making and Breaking the Canon, Cultures of Childhood, Gender & Writing, postcolonial Literature (MA), Writing the Caribbean.
Is there a topic or text you especially enjoy teaching?
Anything which demands further research into cultural and historical context; anything Caribbean! A text which combines the two is Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West Indian Proprietor , published posthumously in 1834. Mathew ‘ Monk’ Lewis is well known to many of us as an English Gothic novelist but he also inherited two sugar plantations in Jamaica and these journals are a record of his two visits there in 1815-16 and in 1817. He died on the journey back to England and these unfinished entries are fascinating reading both for what he does say about life on a slave plantation and what he doesn’t. It’s not entirely certain, even at the end, where he stands in relation to slavery. …
What do you read for pleasure, when you’re not researching? What are your hobbies?
I make myself read a novel for pleasure every Christmas day when everyone else is sleeping off dinner! I also teach new texts every year in order to keep ahead of contemporary writing and shake my teaching up a bit. Besides this, I love reading about vintage finds, upcycling furniture, crafting, gardening – all the things I do with abandon when I’m not working.