Overview
Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City of New York. Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture.
He is currently at work on his first book project, tentatively titled, “The Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by exploring the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Jarvis’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, and The Global South.
Professor McInnis hopes to curate a classroom space where his students feel free to take intellectual risks, and where they can use African diaspora literature and culture to celebrate and affirm black humanity and creativity; interrogate and dismantle systems of power, injustice, and inequality; and imagine new futures and more just worlds.
Office Hours
Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:00(313 Allen)
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
a "reorder of things" in black studies: sacred praxis, phono(geo)graphy, and the counter-archive of diaspora
Journal Article Comparative Literature Studies · February 1, 2022 This article examines Erna Brodber's 1994 novel, Louisiana, as a methodological invitation to the field of Black Studies to query how we do the work of black study. A Jamaican social scientist turned novelist, Brodber finds the tools of social science and ... Full text Open Access CiteBlack Women's Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation
Journal Article American Literary History · December 1, 2019 Full text Open Access CiteA corporate plantation reading public: Labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black South
Journal Article American Literature · September 1, 2019 Featured Publication This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Missis ... Full text Open Access CiteRecent Artistic Works
Imani Uzuri: Lincoln Center's American Songbook
Musical Performance March 1, 2016"Honoring Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka," Ancestral Witnesses: Literature and the African American Religious Imagination
Musical Performance April 1, 2015James Baldwin & Audre Lorde: A Revolutionary Hope, Ancestral Witnesses: Literature and the African American Religious Imagination
Musical Performance December 1, 2014View All Artistic Works