Stacy J. Lettman
Dr. Stacy J. Lettman is Associate Professor of English at 麻豆女郎, where she serves as Director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program and is an affiliate faculty member with the Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) Minor. She specializes in Caribbean literature and cultural studies, with teaching and research interests that include African Diaspora literature, Caribbean studies, Black Atlantic studies, postcolonial literature, Africana studies, folklore, oral literatures, performance studies, speculative literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to culture, power, and social transformation.
In her undergraduate and graduate courses, Dr. Lettman examines questions of identity, aesthetics, folklore, orality, Afro-diasporic spirituality, colonialism, violence, ecology, race, and decolonization. Her scholarship explores the intersections of language, culture, imagination, historical memory, and power, with particular attention to the ways literary and cultural texts illuminate the enduring effects of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism in the Caribbean and the broader African Diaspora.
Her interdisciplinary research on language and violence has been published in Encounters: An International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society and as a chapter in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the Black and Irish Diasporas. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, and postcolonial theory, her work investigates how historical structures of domination continue to shape contemporary forms of subjectivity, representation, and social life.
Dr. Lettman's book, The Slave Sublime: The Language of Violence in Caribbean Literature and Music (UNC Press, 2022), expands her exploration of language to the violence rooted in colonial and plantation histories. Tracing historical legacies in the Caribbean to their present manifestations under globalization, the book examines both real and imagined violence in Caribbean, particularly in Jamaican literature and music. It investigates how violence is reproduced through artistic representation and state power, and what that reveals about Caribbean cultural identity and historical memory. Drawing on and reworking Paul Gilroy's concept of the 鈥渟lave sublime,鈥 Dr. Lettman develops a distinctly Caribbean framework for understanding the afterlives of slavery, arguing that colonial violence has become embedded within the language, aesthetics, and cultural production of the region while simultaneously generating forms of resistance, survival, and cultural renewal.
A central intervention of the book is its rethinking of the philosophical tradition of the sublime. While classical theories of the sublime, particularly those associated with Immanuel Kant, understand sublimity as a movement in which Reason ultimately disciplines and surpasses the imagination, The Slave Sublime argues that such a framework cannot fully account for the historical realities of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe, and through analyses of Caribbean literature, music, and Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions, Dr. Lettman demonstrates how colonial domination sought not only to control land, labor, and bodies but also to constrain the imaginative capacities through which individuals and communities understand themselves and their worlds. By foregrounding the imagination as a crucial site of historical consciousness, cultural memory, and resistance, The Slave Sublime challenges philosophical traditions that subordinate imagination to Reason, arguing instead for its central role in confronting the enduring legacies of colonial violence and in sustaining practices of survival, meaning-making, and cultural renewal.听
Dr. Lettman's current book project, Ghosts of Captured Futures: Racial Capitalism, Imagination, and the Governance of Futurity in the African Diasporic Americas, examines how African diasporic literary and cultural texts engage questions of futurity, temporality, and imagination within the historical contexts of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Bringing together Black Atlantic thought, folklore studies, Africana theory, and literary criticism, the project explores how writers across the Americas represent contested relationships to the future while illuminating the social and historical forces that shape horizons of possibility. The book extends Dr. Lettman's ongoing interest in the ways power operates through culture, memory, and the imagination, and in how literature reveals the enduring entanglements of past, present, and future.
Dr. Lettman earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California (USC), where she was an Irvine Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.