David Luis-Brown receives Du Bois Institute Fellowship

David Luis-Brown, Assistant Professor in the English Department, has been awarded a residential research fellowship at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research fellowship at Harvard University for the spring of 2009. Founded in 1975, the Du Bois Institute is the nation's oldest research center devoted to the study of African and African American culture and history, and is now directed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Du Bois Institute fellowship will allow Luis-Brown to extend his junior faculty research leave in the fall of 2008 into a year of research and writing. As a fellow at the Du Bois Institute, Luis-Brown will continue work on his second book, tentatively entitled Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in U.S. and Cuban Culture. Blazing at Midnight is a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of the uses of slave rebellion in constructing social identity at moments of national crisis. This study reveals that at times of political impasse, a wide range of social groups--nonslaveholding whites, Cuban nationalist exiles, natural scientists, travel writers, and male and female slaves--thought through the significance of the slave rebel as providing a model for alternative social arrangements. Slave insurrection became especially attractive to U.S. antislavery advocates following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to rural whites in both countries, and to a dissenting group of Cuban nationalist exiles in New York City in the early 1850s. The multiple uses of the trope of slave rebellion expose its centrality to mid-nineteenth-century debates over race, nation and empire. The bulk of this study focuses on novels (by Martin R. Delany, Richard Hildreth, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Cirilo Villaverde) and slave narratives (by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Francisco Manzano), but other cultural texts such as travel narratives, court proceedings, periodicals and visual culture also figure in the book's analyses.

Luis-Brown's first book, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in the fall of 2008. Waves of Decolonization examines writers in the Americas whose focus on race and empire led them to devise discourses of hemispheric cirtizenship that challenged conventional conceptions of rights, redressing their loss under the expanding U.S. empire. Luis-Brown teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Latino/a and African American literature and culture as well as in comparative Americas studies.

April 1, 2008