Imani D. Owens on Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean

This discussion is with Dr. Imani D. Owens, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  She studies and teaches African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Princeton University, a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. She is currently a faculty fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. In this conversation we discuss her book Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press: Black Lives in the Diaspora series) where she charts the connection between literary form and anti-imperialist politics in Caribbean and African American texts during the interwar period. 

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.