About the Contributors

Daphne A. Brooks is an Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is also developing new projects on the politics of black bohemia in post-Civil Rights popular music and literature; and black feminist performance and satire. Brooks has written various articles on race, gender, performance and popular culture such as "Burnt Sugar: Post-Soul Satire and Rock Memory," This is Pop: Critical Essays from the First Annual Experience Music Project Conference on Popular Music, ed. Eric Weisbard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004); "'It's Not Right But It's Okay:' Contemporary Black Women's R&B and the House that Terry McMillan Built," SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (5:1), Winter 2003; and "'The Deeds Done in My Body:' Black Feminist Theory, Performance, and the Truth About Adah Isaacs Menken," Recovering the Body: Self Representations by African American Women Writers, eds. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). She is also the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, forthcoming) and The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere, series eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2005). Brooks is currently a Behrman Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton and former Samuel Davies Preceptor. She is the past recipient of numerous fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship Program, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Brooks has also held residence at U.C. Berkeley as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow and at Harvard University as a W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute Fellow. [Go to Daphne A. Brooks's article]

Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. She studied at the Sorbonne where she obtained a doctorate in comparative literature. After spending many years in Africa and her home island of Guadeloupe, she moved to the U.S. in 1989 where she was appointed professor in the French Department at UC Berkeley. She taught on numerous U.S. campuses before settling in New York where she is professor emeritus at Columbia University. She is also a writer of international stature. Her books have been translated worldwide, especially in English, including Windward Heights, Desirada and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat, which recently won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She divides her time between New York and her home island of Guadeloupe. [Go to Maryse Condé's contribution]

Jonathan P. Eburne is Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Penn State University. He specializes in the study of surrealism and the international avant-garde, and has published essays on Chester Himes, Marcel Duchamp, and William Burroughs, in addition to numerous essays on surrealism. He is co-editor of a recent special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled "Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic." His book, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2008. [Go to Jonathan P. Eburne's article]

Geneviève Fabre is professor emerita at the University of Paris Diderot (Paris VII) where she served as Director of the African-American and Diasporas Studies Program. She is the author of Parcours Identitaires (1983) and Le Theatre Noir aux Etats-Unis (1982), and editor of African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds: Consciousness and Imagination (2004) and Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities (1995). She has also co-edited several collections of essays, including Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (2001), Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (2000), Celebrating Ethnicity and the Nation (2002), and History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994). In addition, she has received prestigious fellowhips from Harvard University's Du Bois Institute, the National Humanities Center, The Bogliasco Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. [Go to Geneviève Fabre's article]

Michel J. Fabre was professor emeritus at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) where he directed a Ph. D program and a Research center in African American studies and post-colonial literatures from 1975 to 1993. He served as president of the Cercle d'Etudes Afro-Américaines. He has published, edited, or translated over twenty volumes dealing with black America, slavery, African American literature and its reception abroad and also with writers Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Claude McKay, Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Margaret Lawrence. His best-known books are The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973), From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1992), and The Several Lives of Chester Himes (in collaboration with Ed Margolies, 1998). [Go to Michel J. Fabre's article]

Terri Francis earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2004, where she specialized in African American literature and culture. This background provides a broad, interdisciplinary cultural context for her current work in cinema studies. As an Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, her courses on African American cinema, avant-garde cinema, black women's filmmaking and the Harlem Renaissance focus on film as a social and aesthetic text, while attending to its unique structures through close analysis. Her manuscript, Under a Paris Moon: Josephine Baker, Primitivism and the Harlem Renaissance, examines Baker's stardom as a site for thinking about the transatlantic exchanges between Paris and Harlem through close readings of Baker's films as well as citations of Baker in recent international cinema. [Go to Terri Francis's article]

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is chair of the Department of English at Dartmouth College, where she teaches courses on the novel, biography, African American and Black British literature. She is the author of Carrington, Black London, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, among others. Next year her biography of Lucy Terry will by published by Amistad/HarperCollins. [Go to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina's contribution]

Kaiama L. Glover is an Assistant Professor in the French Department and the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University. Since receiving her doctorate from Columbia in 2002, she has been lecturing and publishing in the fields of Francophone literature and postcolonial studies. Her classes focus on the literature and culture of the Caribbean, West Africa, and North Africa, but her primary research interest—and passion of late—has been Haiti. Her essay on the novels of the Haitian Spiralists appeared in the fall of 2005 in a volume of collected essays titled Haiti: Writing under Siege, and her article on the "usefulness" of the Haitian zombie as literary metaphor was recently published in the Journal of Haitian Studies. Since receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for the 2005-2006 academic year, she has been focused on the completion of a full-length monograph on the Spiralist literary phenomenon and on the broader question of canon formation in the Francophone Caribbean in particular and in the postcolonial world in general. Her work on Josephine Baker represents her fundamental interest in French constructions of blackness and the persistent impact of France's cultural attitudes on its arguably former colonial empire. [Go to Kaiama L. Glover's contribution]

Terri J. Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The New School, where she teaches in The New School Bachelor's Program and the University Humanities Program. Her interests lie in the areas of ethics, gender studies, and the aesthetics of the body. She has published on the cabaret, post-war film, and performance art in the Third Reich and is currently at work on a book-length study of representations of the dancer in fin de siècle Paris. [Go to Terri J. Gordon's article]

Mae Gwendolyn Henderson is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of articles on African American and feminist criticism and theory, pedagogy, and cultural studies and is editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980). She is also author of the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition" as well as the more recently published "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance." [Go to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's article]

Margo Jefferson earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature from Brandeis University in 1968 and a Master's of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1971, having won the school's prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship along the way. Jefferson came back to the Columbia community from 1991 to 1993, during which time she taught classes in American literature, performing arts criticism, writing, and English. Most recently, she has been a Senior Fellow at Columbia's National Arts Journalism Program (2002-2003), and she currently serves on the faculty of Columbia's School of the Arts Graduate Writing Program. Outside the academic world, Jefferson was an associate editor of Newsweek magazine from 1973 to 1978, and also worked at Vogue and Seven Days magazines. As of the early 1990s, Jefferson began working for The New York Times, first as a critic on the culture desk and then in the position of Sunday theater critic. In 1995, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She has also won awards from the GE/Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and from the American Library Association, and her book-length essay On Michael Jackson was published in 2006 to great critical acclaim. [Go to Margo Jefferson's lecture]

Walter Kalaidjian is a Professor of English and former Director of English Graduate Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where he teaches courses in American literary modernism and the avant-gardes, 20th-Century poetry and poetics, psychoanalytic approaches to literature, and critical theory generally. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and editor of the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (2005); in addition, he is the author of the following books: The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (Columbia UP, 1994), Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia UP, 1989), and Understanding Theodore Roethke (University of South Carolina Press, 1987). He is also the coauthor with Judith Roof and Stephen Watt of Understanding Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). [Go to Walter Kalaidjian's article]

Anthea Kraut is Assistant Professor in the Dance department at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses in dance history and theory. Her articles have been published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, S&F Online, Theatre Journal, emBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, and Theatre Studies. Her book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (University of Minnesota Press, fall 2008), recovers the history and traces the influence of Hurston's presentations of black diasporic folk dance in the 1930s. [Go to Anthea Kraut's article]

Felicia McCarren is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Tulane University, New Orleans. She has written two books published by Stanford University Press: Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003). Her work on French hip hop has appeared in Terrain, and in a collection entitled Blackening Europe (Routledge, 2004). Work on the telephone, cinema, and visual culture of Morocco is forthcoming in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and she is currently working on the problem of gesture as a universal language in global performance and information culture. [Go to Felicia McCarren's article]

Claudine Raynaud holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992) and a doctorate from the University Paul Valéry, Montpellier (1987). She has taught at the University of Birmingham, the University of Liverpool, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and Oberlin College. A Professor of English and American Literature at the University François-Rabelais in Tours, she now heads the nationwide African American Studies Research Group created in 2004. She is the author of Toni Morrison: L'Esthétique de la survie (1997) and has co-edited with Geneviève Fabre Beloved, she is Mine, Essais sur Beloved de Toni Morrison (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1993). A Hurston scholar, she focuses on the inscription of race and sexual difference in self-writing and has published essays on Lorde, Angelou, Brooks, Wideman and Langston Hughes in relation to autobiography. She also works intermittently in conjunction with the ITEM-CNRS (Paris). Her most current publications are "The Poetry of Abjection in Morrison's Beloved" in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, (Maria Diedrich and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Petersen Eds. Oxford University Press, 1999) and more recently, "Coming of Age in the African American Novel," chapter 6 in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, 2004, and "Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory" in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, 2006, both from Cambridge University Press. [Go to Claudine Raynaud's article]

Tyler Stovall received his doctorate in modern French history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at Ohio State University, UC-Santa Cruz, and at the Université de Polynésie française in Tahiti. He is currently a professor of history at UC-Berkeley and is the author of several books, including Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996); recent works include The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (2003), co-edited with Sue Peabody. He is currently working on the history of migration from the French Caribbean to France. [Go to Tyler Stovall's article]

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