This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects examine private and public forms of correspondence—from letters of enslaved children to street graffiti—and reveal how these forms of communication not only illuminate different understudied perspectives but also can invoke political change.
Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Duke University
Isabel C. Gómez
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Aaron Kamugisha
Smith College
Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Project: Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World
Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Her work centers marginalized voices and shows how their contributions can offer us new ways to think about contemporary cultural and political questions. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020), published in France as Imaginer la libération: Des femmes noires face à l’empire (Éditions Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023). She is also the coeditor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her new project, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World (under contract), examines what writings by enslaved children can teach us about history and narrative.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I came across a letter written to Benjamin Franklin by an enslaved boy who had been thrown into a prison dungeon in Paris for running away from his enslaver. His plea for life, freedom, and happiness was far more poignant than the Declaration of Independence Franklin had co-signed four years earlier. I wanted to learn more about how enslaved children defined and articulated what freedom might mean to them. How did young people understand the violent and brutal world around them as they came of age in slavery? What imaginative worlds and selves did they create in their writings? And how might these texts inform how we read enslaved people’s accounts today?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have been surprised by how prolific some young people were, and at the same time how little attention we have paid to their writings. One girl, Euphémie Toussaint, wrote about 450 letters to her uncle—a formerly enslaved man from Saint Domingue—between the ages of seven and fourteen. Her letters are a treasure trove that paint a fascinating picture of life in New York City in the 19th century.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope my research will shine a spotlight on children like Euphémie Toussaint whose firsthand experiences illuminate the history of slavery from an understudied perspective.
Isabel C. Gómez
Project: Divest from English: Eco-Translation and Translingual Repair
Isabel C. Gómez is an associate professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where her research and teaching focus on translation studies, Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures, and contemporary poetics. Her first book, Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (Northwestern University Press 2023) received the 2024 Harry Levin Prize awarded annually from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for the best first book in comparative literature. Recent publications can be found in Translation Review, the Journal of World Literature, Mutatis mutandis, Hispanic Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jacket2. From 2020 to 2023, she served as president of the Translation Studies Research Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA); in this capacity, she coedited the volume Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice (Routledge 2024). Currently her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
A visit to the “La esquina” bookstore in San Juan, Puerto Rico sparked my interest in multilingual poetry on climate justice. Walking there, I passed murals, multilingual graffiti, and installations from a “Trash Art Festival.” The art contained political and ecological messaging: “nuestra tierra no se vende,” “welcome to the oldest colony,” “promesa ¡es! pobreza.” The central sculpture was an astronaut holding a globe; his hollow body and oxygen-tank backpack made of metal fencing enclose a jungle of plants. Is the astronaut taking Puerto Rican flora to a new planet, or searching for answers in mini-Earth? In the bookstore, the poetry display featured translingual writing about climate justice, asking the same questions as the art outside: how has monoculture destroyed our planet? And how can multilingual creativity invent something new?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I am consistently surprised by student readers’ reactions to translingual writing. They will use friends and family, online resources, all their knowledge funds to crack open a kernel of information that has provoked curiosity with opacity. By the same token, I have been surprised by the reactions that people have to my project as one that examines the linguistic valence of white supremacy, in which the call to “divest from English” is about divesting from the monoculture upholding language hegemony as one of the pillars of a white supremacist society. Even in scholarly spaces where questions of structural bias are well understood, English-only discourse has often gone unquestioned. When I tell people about my research, I see people noticing this blind spot, and I find that highly motivating.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Eco-translation can be defined as text in which the language content is transformed in a way that responds to environmental crisis or sustainability (Michael Cronin). My hope for my research is to surface the material utility of poetic eco-translation and translingual knowledge production—I want readers to feel excited to create linguistically diverse spaces, as a healing act for our environment and community, as a simple and effective way of including more participants while slowing down. To move global society toward degrowth, in which wellbeing is prioritized over material accumulation, we need to practice new habits and strategies. The poets and climate activists I study are developing powerful tools for refocusing our attention and pacing, and I hope my research can help translate their practices into wider use cases and audiences.
Aaron Kamugisha
Project: Bewildering Coloniality: Austin Clarke and the Twentieth Century Black Atlantic World
Aaron Kamugisha is a scholar of the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora, and is the Ruth Simmons Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College. He serves on the editorial boards of Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, Social and Economic Studies, and The Journal of West Indian Literature. He is also the co-executive director of the Race and Resistance book series with Peter Lang Publishers, and an inaugural member of the Other Universals transnational research collective. His latest book, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition, was published by Indiana University Press, with a simultaneous edition by University of Witwatersrand Press in 2019. He is the editor of eight edited books and seven special issues of journals on Caribbean and Africana thought.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
For the last two decades, my scholarly work has centered on the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora. In recent times, within that tremendously wide field of inquiry, I have focused on Caribbean intellectual history, which has led me to the work of Austin Clarke. Austin Clarke’s lifework is situated at the crossroads of the vast diasporic literary and cultural terrain which constitutes Africana studies—he was the first West Indian to publish a novel in Canada, and the first writer of African descent to become a major Canadian literary figure. My book in progress, Bewildering Coloniality: Austin Clarke and The Twentieth Century Black Atlantic World is a study of one of the Africana world’s distinguished twentieth century writers, through his novels, social and political thought, and short stories.
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have been fascinated—and overwhelmed—by the sheer amount of correspondence that Austin Clarke shared with other Caribbean writers, particularly those located in the UK. During my research at the British Library in summer 2022, I examined scores of letters between Clarke and the Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey, which are not only testimony to a remarkable literary friendship, but provide valuable insights on the fashioning of a Black diaspora intellectual community from the 1960s through 1980s.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope my research will make a contribution to Africana intellectual history, Caribbean literary studies and the history of the emergence of Black Studies in the United States and Black Canadian Studies in Canada. Clarke had a sustained engagement with Barbados that did not vanish after he migrated to Canada in 1955—he wrote hundreds of newspaper columns in Barbadian publications from the 1970s through 2000s, and half of his ten novels are set there. There’s a tremendous amount still to be written about Clarke’s contribution to Barbadian literary and cultural life, as well as his social and political thought, and will be part of the contribution of my ongoing research.