Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Lubabah Chowdhury

2021–22 Graduate Fellow, Ph.D. Candidate in English
Project "Caribbean Women's Writing and Afro-Asian Intimacies, 1948-2001"
Last updated August 9, 2022, based on June 2021 biographical sketch

Biography

At the time of her fellowship, Lubabah Chowdhury was a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. Her dissertation,“Caribbean Women’s Literature and Afro-Asian Intimacies, 1948-2001,” investigates Caribbean women’s literary, journalistic and activist contributions to anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist movements both in the Anglophone Caribbean and the diaspora in Britain during the latter half of the 20th century. The project examines literary and archival representations of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean “intimacies,” a term that denotes both the relationships between the two communities in the public sphere and the private interpersonal relationships often depicted by Caribbean women writers. By grounding close readings and investigations of literary form and genre in four different geographic sites — the colonial classroom, the sites of exploited labor represented by the plantation and the oil field, the activist organization and the prayer space — this project conceives of each geography as a contact zone where Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean women both struggled together and struggled with one another. The project makes an important and timely intervention in conversations about Caribbean literature and Caribbean radicalism, which all too often center male writers, thinkers, and activists and do not adequately account for the intimate ties between the anti-racist, anti-colonial, and feminist struggles during the Cold War era.