Jennifer P. Nesbitt on Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Jennifer Nesbitt, professor of English at the York campus of The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches everything from first-year composition to upper-division courses in women’s writing and Caribbean culture. She is the author of two books: Narrative Settlements: Genre and Geography in British Women’s Fiction, 1918-1939, from the University of Toronto Press in 2005, a survey of place, nation, and gender as women writers responded to enfranchisement in the wake of World War I. As she was completing that project, the idea for her second book, Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture, emerged from classroom experiences and burgeoned into a cross-cultural examination of the presence of rum as a marker for the transformation (or not) of colonial ideologies and subjects in the decolonial and postcolonial period. In addition to this work, she has held the position of editor of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 since 2020 and is active in the Feminist inter/Modernist Studies Association. From 2013-2016, Dr. Nesbitt enjoyed working with popular media and community groups to discuss the PBS television series Downton Abbey; she has published two essays about, respectively, gender and race in that series. Her work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, ARIEL, Clues: The Journal of Detective Fiction, Film & History, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. Currently she is working on a digital cluster on whiteness and modernist studies and she continues to explore the role of rum in late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.