Raj Chetty is an assistant professor of English at St. John’s University, specializing in Caribbean literature and culture across English, Spanish, and French, with a focus on black and African diaspora. His current project, “On Refusal and Recognition”: Black Diaspora and Dominican Cultural Production, studies the articulations between Dominican literary and expressive arts and conceptualizations of black and African diaspora. The book analyzes street and popular theater, baseball and literature, 1960s literary and cultural journals and groups, and includes studies of Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Junot Díaz, Jacques Viau Renaud, and Frank and Reynaldo Disla.
He is the co-editor of a special issue of The Black Scholar on “Dominican Black Studies” (2015). Essays on C. L. R. James, Eric Walrond, Reynaldo Disla, Una Marson, and Frank Disla have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Anthurium, Afro-Hispanic Review, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and The Black International, and Meridional. He is a collaborator on a French translation of Haitian-Dominican Jacques Viau Renaud’s poetry, published in January 2018 by Mémoire d’encrier.
