Seanna Sumalee Oakley
338B Andrews Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
(402)472-3165 (office)
Degrees and Institutions Granting the Degree
- PhD, English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- BA, English and French, UCLA
Professional Areas of Specialty
- Francophone and Anglophone Afro-Caribbean literature
- Comparative African Diasporic and European Poetics
- Genre studies
Courses Regularly Taught
- Afro-Caribbean literature
- Postcolonial Literary Theory
- Twentieth Century Fiction and Poetry
Current Research
The book I’m working on compares figural and generic rhetoric of francophone and anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry and philosophy written within and against the European Romantic tradition. I derive the book’s organizing trope from Édouard Glissant, whose notion of lieux communs or commonplaces—rhetorical hence ideological—provides us a means of apposing rather than opposing ideas. These lieux communs are cross-cultural faultlines which, once subjected to the pressure of African diasporic critique, convulse and yield new alignments
Publications
Scholarly Essays
“Voyance au pays maudit: Allegorical Masks in Frankétienne’s Fleurs
d’insomnie,” Journal of Haitian Studies 14.1(2008): 37-53.
“Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of Difference in Heidegger and Glissant,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41.1 (2008): 1-21.
“Le Masque Blessé / The Afflicted Mask: Romantic Selves, Vodounist Selves in Frankétienne’s Fleurs d’insomnie,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives 4.1 (2007): 67-85.
“A Way to Cross Over: Caribbean Literary Criticism,” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1-15.
Reviews
The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Experience by Lee M.
Jenkins, South Atlantic Review 72.1 (2007): 252-55.
The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean by Doris Garraway, Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora 10.3 (2007): 107ff.
The Arrival of Brighteye by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora 8.3 (2005): 117-120.
