Dr. Raj Chetty
Associate Professor
B.A., University of California, Riverside
M.A. Brigham Young University
Ph.D. University of Washington
Research Focus: Caribbean Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Literary Studies, Black/African Diaspora Studies, Performance Studies
Raj Chetty joined the English department in Fall 2013, as an assistant professor of English. He specializes in Caribbean literature and culture across English, Spanish, and French, with a focus on black and African diaspora. He also teaches world literatures in English and postcolonial literature and theory.
His current project, “On Refusal and Recognition”: Black Diaspora and Dominican Cultural Production, studies the articulations between Dominican literary and expressive arts in the period following the end of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship, and conceptualizations of black and African diaspora. This book examines the ways Dominican articulations and performances of blackness are often unrecognizable to dominant theories and practices of black cultural practice and black diaspora theory. The book analyzes street and popular theater, baseball and literature, 1960s literary and cultural journals and groups, and includes in-depth studies of Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Junot Díaz, Jacques Viau Renaud, and Frank and Reynaldo Disla.
A later project emerging from his dissertation examines the theatrical legacies of C. L. R. James’s landmark work, The Black Jacobins, specifically its stage version. He is the co-editor of a special issue of The Black Scholar on “Dominican Black Studies” (2015). Essays on C. L. R. James, Reynaldo Disla, Eric Walrond, and Una Marson have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Anthurium, Afro-Hispanic Review, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and The Black International.