Raj Chetty

Caribbean Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Literary Studies, Black/African Diaspora Studies, Performance Studies

Raj Chetty teaches world literatures in English and postcolonial literature and theory, with a particular focus on Caribbean literature across English-, Spanish-, and French-language regions.

He is working on two projects currently, one examining the theatrical legacies of C. L. R. James’s landmark work, The Black Jacobins, specifically its stage version, and the other exploring Dominican literary engagements with blackness and Africanness in the period following the end of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship.

This latter project 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 in-depth studies of Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Junot Díaz, Jacques Viau Renaud, and Frank and Reynaldo Disla.