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Faith Smith

Faith
Smith
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Full Year Fellow
Title / Appointment: 
Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
Location: 
Brandeis University

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 
617-496-1130
E-Mail: 
flsmith@fas.harvard.edu

Biography Information

Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English and American Literature at Brandeis University, where she also holds appointments in the Programs in Latin American and Latino Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. In the 2007-08 year she taught “Novel and Film of the African Diaspora”, “Caribbean Women and Globalization”, “Screening the Tropics,” and “Making Modern Subjects: Caribbean/Latin America/USA, 1850-1950.”  She received a BA with a concentration in English from the University of West Indies, Mona, in 1985; an MA in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and a PhD from Duke University’s Graduate Program in Literature in 1995.

Her book, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, New World Studies Series, 2002), provides a context for understanding twentieth-century Caribbean writers such as C.L.R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid. Thomas was well known for his 1869 study of Trinidad's Creole language, as well as for an early example of "writing back to empire" -- his response to a Victorian travel narrative. As a defender of francophone cultural production in a British colony, a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and a pan-Africanist whose commitments were simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas' interests complicate current discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life.

Project Description

Whose Modern? Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Formation, 1880-1915

What did it mean to be “modern” across the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? What did the future look like? While my first project was a “thick description” of intellectual formation in one anglophone territory in the 1870s and 1880s, Whose Modern? mobilizes a wider range of imperial, cultural and linguistic contexts to assess the region’s engagements with its own and others’ modernities, at a moment when, at the turn of the century, those who lived there or felt themselves connected to the region were keenly aware of being subject to the intentions of at least two empires at any given moment: one or other of the European powers (Haiti no less so for being independent), and the new imperial kid on the block, the USA.

I am interested in not just whose modern -- who could be said to possess, or have jurisdiction over, definitions of modernity in this period -- but the homonymous register of who’s modern, the various iterations of who was adjudged to be modern.  If the region was central to the “West’s” sense of itself as modern (even if this centrality has not always been acknowledged), in whose likeness was modernity fashioned when it was being railed against, or hailed, by the region’s people? I examine newspaper advertisements, legal documents, photographs, commission proceedings, and postcards, studies of the period in a range of disciplines, as well as the texts of José Martí, Anténor Firmin, H. G. DeLisser, and others.