Petal Samuel
Assistant Professor
Battle Hall 109
(919) 966-1295
petals@email.unc.edu
Petal Samuel specializes in twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean literature and Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics, and aesthetics. Samuel’s current project examines how the management of the soundscape—through noise abatement laws and public discourses condemning noise—has served as a crucial avenue of racial and colonial governance in both the pre- and post-colonial Caribbean and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. The manuscript highlights the work of Afro-Caribbean women writers who embrace forms of “noisemaking” against the grain of these laws and public discourses, reclaiming them as subversive grammars that are integral to decolonization. From 2016-18, Samuel held a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her work is published in Anthurium, The Black Scholar, and small axe salon.
