Tess E. Chakkalakal
Assistant Professor
Fall 2009
- Slavery and the Literary Imagination (AFRS 011)
- Introduction to Africana Studies (AFRS 101)
| Phone | (207) 721-5150 |
| Title | Assistant Professor |
| Department | Africana Studies |
| 2nd Title | Assistant Professor |
| 2nd Department | ENGLISH |
| Work Location | 213 Adams Hall |
| tchakkal@bowdoin.edu |
Teaching
Professor Chakkalakal has taught previously in Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University and in the English Department at Williams College. She earned her PhD in English from York University, with a focus on early African American Literature.
Research Interests
My work explores the contours of the growing field of Early African American Literature. Recent archival discoveries has rendered this period of African American literature deeply unstable and controversial. My interest in this period is not only archival but also, and primarily, theoretical. Exploring questions of Olaudah Equiano’s nativity, I found myself intrigued by the fictional elements of his Narrative, that is, how he chooses to relate the events of his captivity and freedom, blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It was through this eighteenth-century text that my current book project about fictions of nineteenth-century slave marriage was born.
Together with an International team of scholars, I am editing the Novels of Sutton E. Griggs. These forgotten works of African American literary fiction explicitly address the tensions between fact and fiction that remain a crucial topic of African American literary studies.
Recent Courses
Introduction to Africana Studies 101
This course provides students with an introduction to the major themes and issues relating to the development of African American social and political thought. The course is organized around particular works of African American literature that have been central to the formation of a distinct African American political and cultural identity. Rather than read these texts chronologically we will be reading how specific writers responded to the highly complex, violent, and intimate relationship between “Africa” and “America” as it has developed from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first
Syllabus [ PDF 
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Publications
“Wedded to Race: Charles Chesnutt’s Marital Fiction” in Studies in American Fiction 36.2 (Autumn 2008) 155-76. .
“Making a Collection: James Weldon Johnson and the Mission of African American Literature” Spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3 (2005): 521-541
“Uncle Tom and the Making of Modern African American Literature.” Review of Black Political Economy 33.1 (2005): 73-87.
“I, hereby, vow to Read The Interesting Narrative” in Captivating Voices: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, & Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Jason Haslam and Julia Wright. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 86-109.
“Anita Rau Badami,” South Asian Novelists in English, II. Ed. Jaina Sanga, Greenwood Press, 2004. 20-22.
“Rohinton Mistry.” South Asian Novelists in English: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Ed. Jaina Sanga, Greenwood Press, 2002. 162-168.
“Making an Art Out of Suffering: Bill T. Jones’ Uncle Tom.” Peering Behind the Curtain: Disabilities in Contemporary Drama. Eds. Kimball King and Thomas Fahy, New York: Routledge, 2002. 35-46
“Being Reena in Canada: A Case of Reckless Eyeballing.” Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Criticism Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000. 159-167.
“Rev. of Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America.” Biography: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly. 23.3, (2000): 568-572.