Robin Brooks on Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women's Fiction

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Robin Brooks, an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with an impressive record of scholarship that examines a range of cultural matters concerning Black communities in the United States and the wider African Diaspora. Primary research and teaching interests for Dr. Brooks include contemporary cultural and literary studies as well as working-class studies, Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, higher education management, and education policy. Her research is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been featured in several news media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and she has delivered countless presentations on her work at national and international conferences. Her interdisciplinary work appeals to various audiences and is solution-oriented in order to contribute to dismantling racial and related hierarchies. Challenging conventional boundaries, her scholarship uncovers overlooked and underexamined ways in which African Diasporic cultural representations participate in antiracist and anti-discriminatory struggles. In this conversation we discuss her book Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (UNC Press, 2022), which is a book that examines how contemporary writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the U.S. and Caribbean. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida and an MA in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.