Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
- Mississauga (UTM)
Areas of Interest
- African American Literature
- Caribbean Literature
- Comparative diaspora studies
- Ethics
- Form
Biography
Anna Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book project that examines the relationship between ethics and form in African American and Caribbean Literature.
My book project, Forms of Rearrangement, explores ethics in diverse contexts of oppression. I argue that subaltern subjects articulate ethics through ‘rearrangement,’ whereby they inhabit familiar ethical categories to resignify and redeploy their meanings in literature and archival texts. Key to my argument is the category of ‘habit,’ which spans virtue ethics and phenomenology, but also the violence of racialized labour and the small scale of private action. I study, then, the cohabitations of ethics and racialization, with particular attention to what I interpret as both fields’ interest in ‘formation,’; proceeding from this, then, I study the relays between formation and literary form. From archival letters to slave narratives (Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs) to conjure tales (Charles Chesnutt) to travel narratives (Mary Seacole, Richard Wright) to the novel (V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid), my book examines the navigation of these complex intersections to trace how comparative diasporas contend with, confront, and redeploy ‘difference’ and ‘unevenness’ as both a question of ethics and aesthetics.
Publications
“Stuplime Orientalism” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 2024.
“That Form, Crisis” ASAP/Journal Editor’s Forum. “The Forever Crisis” (Vol. 8, No.2) 2023.
“Circuits though Injury: Plantation Economies and Diasporic Forms in Charles Chesnutt and V.S. Naipaul” Cultural Critique, vol. 109, 2020, p. 95-111.
On Daljit Nagra’s ‘Get off my poem whitey.’ PRAC CRIT. Edition 9, August 2017.