Imani Owens

Imani D. Owens studies and teaches African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her book Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press: Black Lives in the Diaspora series) charts the connection between literary form and anti-imperialist politics in Caribbean and African American texts during the interwar period. Her research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Princeton University, a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. She is currently a faculty fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Global Racial Justice and the Center for Cultural Analysis.

Publications:

• Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (2023), Columbia University Press. New Books Network Podcast: Turn the World Upside Down

Peer-Reviewed Publications: 

“New Empires: The Caribbean and the United States.” Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920–1970, edited by Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 225–240.

“Toward a ‘Truly Indigenous Theatre’: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca.” Postcolonial Reading Publics, special issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. 4.1 (2017): 49-67.

 “Hard Reading: U.S. Empire and Black Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death.” MELUS 41.4 (2016): 96-115.

“Beyond Authenticity: The U.S. Occupation of Haiti and the Politics of Folk Culture.” Journal of Haitian Studies21.2 (2015): 350-370.

ONLINE ESSAY

“The Transnational Labor of Black Resistance: Caribbean Intellectuals Protest the East St. Louis Riots.” small axe salon 26, Oct 2017. 

BOOK REVIEW 

“The Most Talked About Voice in America.”Review of Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine Hayes. Women’s Review of Books, May/June 2018

Awards 

• Faculty Fellow, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, 2021-2022
• Faculty Fellow, Center for Cultural Analysis, 2021-2022
• Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2018
• Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow, 2017
• Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Literature, 2013-2014
• Riley Scholar-in-Residence, Colorado College, 2012-2013