Carole Boyce Davies | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Alma mater | University of Maryland Eastern Shore;Howard University;University of Ibadan |
| Occupation(s) | Professor, author |
| Notable work | Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994);Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) |
| Website | caroleboycedavies |
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor ofAfricana Studies and English atCornell University, the author of the prize-winningLeft of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) andBlack Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature.[1] She is currently theFrank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president ofCornell University.[2] Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from theCaribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York StateAfrican Studies Association.
Boyce Davies has held distinguished professorships at a number of universities including theHerskovits Professor of African Studies atNorthwestern University (2000) and was appointed to theKwame Nkrumah Professor at theUniversity of Ghana, Legon (2015). She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including the three-volumeEncyclopedia of the African Diaspora, and more than a hundred journal articles and encyclopedia entries.
She serves on the International Scientific Committee ofUNESCOGeneral History of Africa, Volume Nine,[3] as coordinator/editor of the epistemological forum on Global Blackness of the forthcoming volume on theAfrican diaspora and is the Vice Chairperson of the African Humanities Forum (based inMali). She has lectured on Black women's writings and experience, Black Left Feminism, and African Diaspora issues across North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, and in Brazil, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, India, and China. She has held visiting professorships at several universities, includingBeijing Foreign Studies University, China, and has been a Fulbright Professor at theUniversity of Brasília, Brazil and theUniversity of the West Indies atSt Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
As Director of African New World Studies atFlorida International University, Boyce Davies developed the Florida Africana Studies Consortium and served on the Florida Commissioner of Education's Task Force for Implementing the Florida Mandate for the Teaching of African American Experience. She has been president of major academic organizations such as theAfrican Literature Association and the Caribbean Studies Association.
Born inTrinidad and Tobago, Boyce Davies studied at theUniversity of Maryland Eastern Shore (B.A. in English) andHoward University (M.A. in African Studies) and received her Ph.D. in African Literature at theUniversity of Ibadan onCommonwealth Scholarship from the government of Trinidad and Tobago.[4] From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was a professor at theState University of New York,Binghamton. In 1997, she was recruited to build the African Diaspora Studies Program atFlorida International University, serving three successful terms there until 2007, when she joined theCornell University faculty.
Boyce Davies is a leading authority on Black women writing cross-culturally. Her bookBlack Women Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) is a study of Black women's writing, broadening the discourse surrounding the representation of and by Black women and women of colour. It explores a complex set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: re-mapping, renaming and cultural crossings; gender, heritage and identity; African women's writing and resistance to domination; marginality, effacement and decentering; gender, language and the politics of location.
She also edited Volumes One and Two ofMoving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (withMolara Ogundipe-Leslie) andBlack Women's Diasporas, a major contribution to our understanding of the issues, experiences, and concerns of Black women writing in different communities and in a wide range of geographic contexts. Covering writers from Africa, Brazil, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and such well-known authors asZora Neale Hurston,Nadine Gordimer, andbell hooks, it contains both creative and critical writings, and by considering the area of critical writing as critical conversation, it allows writer and critic to speak with each other in the creation of the critical voice.
Trinidad-born intellectual-activistClaudia Jones (1915–1964) had long remained outside of academic consideration before Boyce Davies restored her to global, intellectual prominence. InLeft of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008), Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones, a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried inLondon'sHighgate Cemetery, to the left ofKarl Marx — a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting, given how Jones expandedMarxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. In 2008 the book was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, given annually by the Association of Black Women Historians.[5]
Boyce Davies is also the editor ofClaudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011), which brings together for the first time the essays, poetry, and autobiographical and other writings of Claudia Jones.
Boyce Davies has also established herself as a major scholar of Caribbean women writers. Along with Elaine Savory Fido, she coeditedOut of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, the first collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature. The book not only created a field of literary criticism which engaged the absence of women writers from the Caribbean literary canon as it established the presence of these writers historically. But by expanding the narrow terms of Western feminist discourse, it also revitalized Caribbean literature and criticism. Using the metaphor of the "Kumbla" or "calabash" used to protect precious objects, first used by writerErna Brodber, coming “Out of the Kumbla” then signified a movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, and activism, a process which allowed for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated.
Boyce Davies is widely recognized as a trailblazer in African Diaspora Studies. She served as the general editor ofEncyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture (three-volume set), the only single-source collection of the most current scholarship on all aspects of the African Diaspora. Five hundred years of relocation and dislocation, of assimilation and separation has produced a rich tapestry of history and culture into which are woven people, places, and events. This authoritative, accessible work reveals the strands of the tapestry, telling the story of diverse peoples, separated by time and distance, but retaining a commonality of origin and experience.
In collaboration with her former students Meredith Gadsby, Charles Peterson and Henrietta Williams, Boyce Davies editedDecolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies. It asserts that the academy is perhaps the most colonized space. In the 21st century, this has become even clearer now that the academy remains one of the primary sites for the production and re-production of ideas that serve the interests of colonizing powers and its disciplines have yet to be decolonized. This collection of essays argues that African diaspora theory has the possibility of interrupting the current colonizing process and re-engaging the decolonizing process at the level of the mind. In addition, it contends that this will be an ongoing project worthy of being undertaken in a variety of fields of study as we confront the challenges of the 21st century. This assertion has proven revelatory given the current prominence of decolonial discourses.
Both a memoir and a scholarly study, her bookCaribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (University of Illinois Press, 2013) explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. Throughout, Boyce Davies demonstrates how Caribbean cultures circulate internationally and how a Caribbean perspective has linked her political vision to broader currents of the Black World including theCivil Rights Movement, the environmental catastrophes ofHaiti, the failure of the New Orleans levies duringHurricane Katrina, and the use of modern technologies such assmartphones andglobal positioning systems within the Caribbean. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.
Having previously published a number of essays on Black women and political leadership in the African diaspora – notably "Con-di-fi-cation: Black Women, Leadership and Political Power" (2007),"'She Wants the Black Man’s Post': Sexuality and Race in the Construction of Women's Leadership in Diaspora" (2011), "Writing Black Women into Political Leadership: Reflections, Trends and Contradictions" (2015), and "First Ladies/First Wives, First Women Presidents: Sexuality, Leadership and Power in the African Diaspora" (2018) – Boyce Davies in 2022 published her most recent book,Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power, which examines lessons to be drawn from the stories of Black women political leaders globally, includingShirley Chisholm,Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, andMarielle Franco.[6]
Boyce Davies has decades of experience in international education. In the English Department atBinghamton University, SUNY, she served as the co-director of its London study abroad program. As a distinguished visiting professor, she taught Black women's Writing, transnationalism and diaspora, and academic writing atBeijing Jiaotong University,Beijing Foreign Studies University,University of Brasília, and theUniversity of West Indies at St. Augustine. She has also organized and directed Teachers Institutes in New York, Miami, Florida and in the Caribbean—Grenada and Haiti, the latter in conjunction with the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in Haiti (www.caribbeanstudiesassociation.org) and courtesy of a grant from theKellogg Foundation.
In 2011, she was given an ICABA award as one of South Florida's most accomplished executives, professionals and Academicians. In 2008, her bookLeft of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008) won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book on African American Women's History from theAssociation for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).
Boyce Davies was the 2017 recipient of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award (Caribbean Philosophical Association) and the Distinguished Africanist Award (New York State African Studies Association).[7]
Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from theKellogg Foundation, Greene Family Foundation,Smithsonian Institution,Ford Foundation,Florida International University,American Council of Learned Societies, andSUNY - Binghamton Foundation andCaribbean Airlines.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
