ISA Faculty Lecture Series: Petal Samuel: 'The Loudest Place on Earth': Caribbean Soundscapes, Antiblackness, and Right to Quiet Discourse
Date: September 30, 2019
Time: 6:00pm
Address: Fed Ex Global Education Center, Room 1005, 301 Pittsboro Street, Chapel Hill, NC
The ISA Faculty Lecture Series presents Petal Samuel. Dr. Samuel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Africa, African-American and Diasporas Studies at UNC. She 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 Journal of West Indian Literature, The Black Scholar, and small axe salon.
