After the Revolution: Images of Blackness, Images of Love in Literature and Film of the Americas

Jamie Rogers
Comparative Literature
UC Los Angeles

This dissertation examines Black novelists and filmmakers whose work is situated in various “post-revolutionary” periods; that is, in moments that come after heightened expectations of a revolution. These moments no longer involve explosive transformation, but rather the enervating work of living within newly defined social and political fields. Specifically, the dissertation looks at post-1959 Cuba, post-Civil Rights United States, and post-revolutionary Grenada. Such a project calls for engagement with felt or sensory experiences; what scholars have called the “affective turn.” The methodological framework is shaped by such a turn, focusing on embodied and everyday expressions of the political. It also claims a genealogy of affect theory that recognizes Black feminist thought as a precursor to contemporary affect theory. This reevaluation of affect theory insists that any examination of the political and historical be attentive to raced and gendered assemblages that continue to structure global inequities today.