I teach Caribbean literature and culture in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and serve as Editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform. I’ve abandoned Twitter, but you can find me on Mastodon @rmordecai.

I was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Despite living in many places since, I continue to think of Kingston as home, and to think of myself as a Caribbean Caribbeanist – that is, the Caribbean is both the object of my study, and the ground of my identity. For this reason (although I do not study it professionally), climate change is never far from my mind. The Caribbean is, and will continue to be, on the front lines of the devastation we are already seeing and that we know will get worse. How much worse depends on the actions we take – or fail to take – right now.

Current projects and news

Monograph: a study of Caribbean family sagas, underway; tentatively titled “No Ancestry Except the Black Water” (a quote from Dionne Brand). The book is making slow but steady progress; a version of the chapter on Maryse Condé‘s family sagas will appear in a volume entitled Diaspora and Literary Studies, edited by Angela Naimou and forthcoming shortly from Cambridge UP.

Other parts of my brain are still taken up with the new project on text and textile in Caribbean and African-diaspora lit. It’s still unclear to me what form(s) it will ultimately take, but I presented an initial foray in October 2018 at the West Indian Literature Conference in Miami; you can read that paper here. I’m also (less formally) writing on texts and textiles here, here and here; and I edited and contributed to a special issue of sx salon on this topic.

I’ve also joined a student-and-employee (faculty and staff) coalition on my campus entitled ESAM: the Environmental and Social Action Movement, which aims to shift UMass Amherst campus policies in the direction of ever-greater justice, equity, and environmental responsibility to meet the urgency of our times.

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