Marsha Jean-Charles is a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies, interested in transnational literary studies of black women’s coming-of-age, (im)migration novels and conceptualizations of black feminisms in the contemporary moment. Ever intrigued by the transformations of protagonists in texts that enhance understandings of cosmologies and revolutionary politics aroused from intersectional identity formation, forced migration, and statelessness, Marsha’s research itself exists at the intersection of radical politics, identity, and art. She explores these sites by advancing two concepts, “Black Feminist Citizenship” and “Dyaspora Saudade.” In discussing artists of the African—and principally Haitian—diaspora in the USA, Cuba, and Brazil, she seeks to use these terms to catalogue their rebellions.
An organizer at her core, she fuses her academic work with her activist work and expands understandings of the uses of literary and performance art as tools for activism.