Jenny Sharpe


Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literatures, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.
In 2014, she became the Chair of Gender Studies, and is also Professor of English and Comparative Literature. From 2017-2018, she was the Stuart Hall Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.

Early life and education

Sharpe was born in London, UK, and raised in Bombay, India. She a first generation-college graduate. Upon receiving her high school diploma, Sharpe became a flight attendant for Beirut-based Middle East Airlines, flying primarily throughout the Arab world. After coming to the United States, Sharpe settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where she worked in the stationery department at the local Woolworth's Department Store to save up enough money for college tuition, before enrolling at the University of Texas in Austin, in 1978.
After earning her BA, Sharpe was accepted to UT's PhD program in Comparative Literature where she met Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the founders of postcolonial and subaltern studies. Spivak became her dissertation chair, and supervised Sharpe's doctoral thesis.
Sharpe teaches courses on postcolonial theory, Caribbean literature, memory studies, and narrative theory at UCLA.
She lives in Los Angeles.

Work

Sharpe is author of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, which provides historically-grounded readings of Anglo-Indian fiction for how representations of interracial rape helped manage a crisis in British colonial authority. Her book has been widely reviewed and is considered a classic in postcolonial studies. Her second book, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives, challenges the equation of subaltern agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine black women’s negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.
Sharpe has published widely on gender, the Black Atlantic and cultural theories of postcoloniality and globalization in Gender and History, Signs, Atlantic Studies, PMLA, and Meridians, among other journals. Her latest book, “Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss" was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. The book identifies a philosophy of history and a theory of the archive from Caribbean literature and art.

Publications

Her published works include the books Allegories of Empire, Ghosts of Slavery, essays, published interviews with Gayatri Spivak, and several edited volumes on postcolonial and Caribbean literature.
Select Publications
.
“Plunder and Play: Éduoard Duval-Carrié’s Artistic Visions.” Callaloo 30: 2 : 561-69.
“Cartographies of Globalisation, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.” Gender and History 15: 3 : 439-58.
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.