Amanda Perry focuses on the comparative literature and history of former slave societies, working between English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole, with a particular eye toward Caribbean transnationalism. She completed her PhD at New York University in 2019, earning distinction. Her dissertation reframes the Cuban Revolution as a Caribbean event, while she has also published on nineteenth and twentieth century political discourse in Haiti and the role of statistics in the British debates over the abolition of the slave trade. She collaborates with the Columbia University Digital Humanities Initiative In the Same Boats, which maps the travels of key Caribbean intellectuals, as the editor for C.L.R. James and George Lamming. Since 2019, she has been a faculty member at Champlain College-Saint Lambert, and she also teaches Caribbean literature at Concordia University in Montreal. Supervisors: Sibylle Fischer, J. Michael Dash, and David Scott Address: New York, United States
This essay analyzes the long genealogy of Haitian indigenism as an alternative discourse to diasp... more This essay analyzes the long genealogy of Haitian indigenism as an alternative discourse to diaspora in discussing Caribbean identity. I focus on two moments when indigenous rhetoric becomes prominent: the 1920s cultural movement against the U.S. Occupation and the War of Independence itself. At both of these conjunctures, the rhetoric of indigeneity foregrounds issues of sovereignty, making specific territorial claims on the basis of filiation while demanding the expulsion of others as foreign. At the same time, the term indigène more frequently designates a position in relation to an imperial power than a set of concrete cultural attributes, advancing an argument that is more political than essentialist. While examining how this indigenous rhetoric envisions relations with the aboriginal Taino, I demonstrate the strengths, limitations, and contradictions of a discourse that sought to anchor Africans and their descendants in New World spaces.
What can numbers accomplish when paired with an ethical or affective argument? In the context of ... more What can numbers accomplish when paired with an ethical or affective argument? In the context of debates over the abolition of the slave trade, I investigate the role of numbers in the struggle for discursive authority between pro-slave trade advocates and abolitionists and examine the multiple effects of mortality statistics in particular as a means of representing human suffering. While pro-slave trade advocates insisted their eyewitness status made them expert interpreters of these statistics and elided the visceral reality of slave deaths, abolitionists used statistics to position accounts of individual suffering as representative of systematic violence. By constructing the number as a transparent bearer of meaning and through massive efforts of data collection, the abolitionists were able to use statistics to counter claims that they were ignorant about the West Indies and that slave abuse was exceptional. Their depictions of slaves as suffering objects, however, while effective in grounding the abstraction of numbers in recognition of the trade's brutality, also elided slave subjectivity, making them as interchangeable as numerical representation implies. This prime example of Michel Foucault's " tactical polyvalence of discourse " demonstrates both the limitations and strengths of quantification in advancing humanitarian causes. T he number of deaths speaks for itself " (18), announced William Wilber-force on May 13, 1789, as he introduced the resolutions that would precede his first attempt to pass a bill abolishing the slave trade. However, if the debates over the future of the British slave trade indicate anything on the matter , it is that neither numbers nor deaths speak for themselves. They are made to speak by others in complex and often contradictory ways.
This essay analyzes the long genealogy of Haitian indigenism as an alternative discourse to diasp... more This essay analyzes the long genealogy of Haitian indigenism as an alternative discourse to diaspora in discussing Caribbean identity. I focus on two moments when indigenous rhetoric becomes prominent: the 1920s cultural movement against the U.S. Occupation and the War of Independence itself. At both of these conjunctures, the rhetoric of indigeneity foregrounds issues of sovereignty, making specific territorial claims on the basis of filiation while demanding the expulsion of others as foreign. At the same time, the term indigène more frequently designates a position in relation to an imperial power than a set of concrete cultural attributes, advancing an argument that is more political than essentialist. While examining how this indigenous rhetoric envisions relations with the aboriginal Taino, I demonstrate the strengths, limitations, and contradictions of a discourse that sought to anchor Africans and their descendants in New World spaces.
What can numbers accomplish when paired with an ethical or affective argument? In the context of ... more What can numbers accomplish when paired with an ethical or affective argument? In the context of debates over the abolition of the slave trade, I investigate the role of numbers in the struggle for discursive authority between pro-slave trade advocates and abolitionists and examine the multiple effects of mortality statistics in particular as a means of representing human suffering. While pro-slave trade advocates insisted their eyewitness status made them expert interpreters of these statistics and elided the visceral reality of slave deaths, abolitionists used statistics to position accounts of individual suffering as representative of systematic violence. By constructing the number as a transparent bearer of meaning and through massive efforts of data collection, the abolitionists were able to use statistics to counter claims that they were ignorant about the West Indies and that slave abuse was exceptional. Their depictions of slaves as suffering objects, however, while effective in grounding the abstraction of numbers in recognition of the trade's brutality, also elided slave subjectivity, making them as interchangeable as numerical representation implies. This prime example of Michel Foucault's " tactical polyvalence of discourse " demonstrates both the limitations and strengths of quantification in advancing humanitarian causes. T he number of deaths speaks for itself " (18), announced William Wilber-force on May 13, 1789, as he introduced the resolutions that would precede his first attempt to pass a bill abolishing the slave trade. However, if the debates over the future of the British slave trade indicate anything on the matter , it is that neither numbers nor deaths speak for themselves. They are made to speak by others in complex and often contradictory ways.
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