Speakers
- Petal Samuel
- University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Petal Samuel is an assistant professor in the Department of African, African American, & Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She specializes in twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean women’s writing and Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics, and aesthetics. Petal’s manuscript, Polluting the Soundscape, examines how the management of the soundscape—through noise abatement laws and public discourses condemning noise—has served as a crucial avenue of racial and colonial governance in both the pre- and post-colonial Caribbean and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. The manuscript highlights the work of Afro-Caribbean women writers who embrace forms of “noisemaking” against the grain of these laws and public discourses, reclaiming them as subversive grammars that are integral to decolonization. Her work is published in Anthurium, the Journal of West Indian Literature, The Black Scholar, and small axe salon.