Patriann Smith, Ph.D.

Thanks to Cambridge University Press, my blog post “Sans “White Gaze”: From the Transgressive Multilingual Radiance of a Franco-Malian Pop Star to the Transnational Englishes of Innocent Caribbean Youth” is now available in Fifteen Eighty Four.

1584

It was in 1584, according to the historical archives that “Walter Raleigh obtained a patent from Queen Elizabeth I to explore and colonize lands in the New World, and two ships sailed from England, landing on the coast of North Carolina, marking the first time the English flag waved in the New World.”

It was also in 1584 that Cambridge University Press was born under the auspices of King Henry VIII, a press granted letters patent as both the oldest publishing house and the oldest university press in the world — a press known as the King’s Printer which would go on to publish its first Bible, the Geneva Bible, in 1591, and its first translation of the King James Version in 1629. 

And it was in 1584, in response to the invitation of King Philip II of Spain, that an assassin shot and killed William the Silent — one of the wealthiest noblemen in Europe, who, though raised a Roman Catholic, would later become a Protestant as committed to liberty as he was to Protestantism.

Grappling with the Entanglements of New Worlds

As a US immigrant scholar of Saint Lucian origin in the New World, much of which was colonized by Britain, and as the daughter of a father who was raised as a Roman Catholic only to become a Seventh-Day Adventist Protestant around the time of my birth, the year 1584 holds quite a fascination for me. It is therefore fitting that the heralding of my new Cambridge University Press book signaled in the blog post, “Sans “White Gaze”: From the Transgressive Multilingual Radiance of a Franco-Malian Pop Star to the Transnational Englishes of Innocent Caribbean Youth” should emerge in the Cambridge University Press blog, “Fifteen Eighty Four” — a representation of my continued effort as an immigrant human and scholar to make visible the significance of reconciling lost descendant African selves, ancestrally deprived of the sacred choice of migration and forced instead from homelands only to continue to grapple with a perpetual beckoning of emerging selves in new lands while working to transcend the long-standing glorification of colonial legacy. 

A Reconciliatory Imperative

Like I explain elsewhere, after centuries of horrific hurt and pain carried by both us and our ancestors, we remain — so many of us born of the sacred Afrocentric tradition — representations of both the enslaved and the enslaver, racially entangled with Englishes and coloniality even as Englishes and the colonial legacy remain racially entangled with us.

To accept the current self with its racialized entanglements — good as well as bad — thereby applauding the Afrocentric legacies of a shared humanity ingrained in our ancestral DNA while also acknowledging the often overlooked horrific vestiges of the colonial attempts at mastering other humans that run through so many of our veins as unwitting descendants of the enslaver, is in itself the greatest act of resistance. 

To choose not to destroy the beings that we now are — who harbor more often than not, both an inadvertent inheritance of trauma and at the same time the very embodiment of the evil enslavement that was so destructive to our ancestors, is alas, redemptive — a choice to allow the imperfectly crafted self to flourish, to engage in a Sankofan reconciliation of its pasts, presents, and futures — a self ultimately seeking through a hopeful climax the redemptive quest to be truly free. 

“Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence”

And this is what the book “Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence” ultimately seeks — a book invoking the Black immigrant as a prism, relying on authentic narratives of migrating while multilingual and Black, painting a portrait defined by intersectionalities of race, language, and migration — but which at its core, represents the redemptive seeking of much more: the desire to burn a reconciliatory fire that sets us truly free. 

More here.