ISA Faculty Lecture Series: Petal Samuel, ‘The Loudest Place on Earth: Caribbean Soundscapes, Antiblackness and Right to Quiet Discourse’

The Institute for the Study of the Americas Faculty Lecture Series presents Petal Samuel, assistant professor in the Department of Africa, African-American and Diasporas Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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 Journal of West Indian Literature, The Black Scholar and small axe salon.