Joseph Jordan
2015

His dissertation project, tentatively titled “Fugitive Heuristics: Comparative Marronage and Problems of Historical Representation,” investigates a series of antagonistic representations of marronage in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than producing a history (or histories) of marronage—national or otherwise—his project uses public representations of marronage to investigate and problematize the disciplines which take maroons as object of study: history, anthropology, literature, and political science.

Thus his research is as much concerned with the production of knowledge about maroons, as it is with public understandings of what practices of marronage signify in the modern world when they are invoked in contemporary situations. The study of literary production by maroons, and about maroons is key for this study.

The generous research grant from the Dr. Silvia W. de Groot Fonds will permit Joseph to conduct archival research in Suriname (Nationaal Archief Suriname) and Jamaica (Jamaica Records and Archives Department) on public commemorations and material culture pertaining to maroons in both respective countries.

Joseph Jordan is PhD student in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include—but are not limited to—racial slavery; cultural memory; theories of race, gender and the political; Black intellectual history; British Cultural Studies; and speculative fiction. Prior to his current doctoral study at Vanderbilt University, he respectively obtained degrees in Postcolonial Studies and African American Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Northwestern University at the master’s level. Joseph D. Jordan is of Afro-Surinamese descent, and was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.