Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches nineteenth and twentieth century American and African American literature, cultural studies and feminist theory. Selected and recent publications include: A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley 2015), Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (Rutgers University Press 2012), “Insubordinate Islands and Coastal Chaos: Pauline Hopkins Literary Land/Seascapes” in Archipelagic American Studies (Duke 2017), and Vixen, a debut poetry collection forthcoming September 2017 from Autumn House Press.
The two writing samples I will submit for the workshop reflect parallel projects that entwine literary mappings with personal inquiry and critical investigation about the nature of belonging and global black identity within an elastic circuit of circum-Caribbean terrains and temporalities. The first is a précis for a monograph tentatively-titled “The Specter of Haiti and the Transnational Black Female Subject.” The prisms of island, archipelagic, and environmental studies are foundational this book-in-progress addressing the flow of insurgency, of anti-colonial thought and action, manifest in the literature of the Americas through the hybridized bodies of black women. I argue that “Haiti,” an evolving and dynamic symbol of Afro-Caribbean self-determination and new world vengeance, functions as a site of radical insurrection across racial, gender, class, sexual, political, and geographic lines in early and contemporary African American literature. I focus on literary texts, visual art, and other cultural productions featuring characters of indeterminate or questionable multi-ethnic ancestry created at key moments: the colonial period, the early republic, on the brink of civil war, and Reconstruction.
The concepts and methodologies arising from Archipelagic American studies (as they intersect with studies of the African Diaspora) similarly inform the writing of a trio of nonfiction essays currently underway entitled “Isle of Refuge,” “Saltworks,” and “Sanctuary.” Each explores the links between African Americans in the United States and the Atlantic Commons in the style of Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and historian Tiya Miles’s speculative explorations of haunted geographies. My particular emphasis is on how the “dark” and “heritage” tourism industries complicate our understanding of how islands, as tropes and material sites, figure into the circulation and commodification of black labor and leisure. For my second submission to the workshop, I will submit a section of “Isle of Refuge,” a nonfiction essay that tracing my journey following the ADHT (African Diaspora Heritage Trail) starting in Bermuda. In this piece, I weave in my academic pursuit of Mary Prince, author of the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), with the experience of taking my children with me through the pitfalls of heritage tourism. I anticipate the feedback and exchange from the workshop will help me shape, rethink, and potentially transform my approaches to both projects in a way that will broaden the audience and sharpen the impact of my writing.
