Faculty Spotlight: Sasha Ann Panaram
By Emma Paolini
Professor Sasha Ann Panaram, Ph.D., joined the Fordham University English Department in Fall 2020 after completing her doctoral degree in English and certificates in African & African American Studies and Feminist Studies at Duke University. However, her connection to the Bronx and the study of English go back far deeper. Dr. Panaram first remembers her interest in Carribean literature sparked around the kitchen table in her childhood home in the Bronx. “My mother and father would recall memories of growing up in Guyana. Through them I first learned about Guyanese writers such as Walter Rodney, Wilson Harris, Grace Nichols, and others,” says Panaram. “I grew up hearing relatives discuss the crossing of the kala pani or ‘dark waters’ of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans that our ancestors endured as indentured servants who traveled from India to parts of the West Indies such as Guyana, Trinidad, and elsewhere.”
While she heard of the kala pani at home and learned about the horrors of the Middle Passage at school, Panaram remembers being “struck by how little information the term ‘the Middle Passage’ conveyed as opposed to kala pani which imparted something about the nature of the waters, the roughness of the seas, and even the madness induced by crossing the ocean.” From this interest in the lived experiences of enslaved peoples who endured the Middle Passage, Panaram formulated her research questions: “How do we begin to describe something that has no beginning, middle, or end? What do we make of a catastrophe that is not confined to a narrow strait but whose nomenclature suggests otherwise? How do you stop something deliberately set in motion?” Using these questions as her starting point, Panaram focused her research on Black women writers who reconstructed histories of the Middle Passage through their writing.
During her time at Duke, Dr. Panaram also co-hosted a webcast with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, called “Left of Black.” The webcast, airing weekly, discusses issues related to the Black diaspora with scholars, artists, and activists. For Panaram, the goal of “Left of Black” was to bring scholarly discussions to spaces both in and out of the university setting, making this work accessible to people outside of academia. “‘Left of Black’ gave me an opportunity to do just that and imagine how I might continue to do that work at Fordham University,” says Panaram.
While hosting the webcast, Panaram interviewed the award-winning novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips; writer and curator Chaédria LaBouvier, who organized the exhibit “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story” at the Guggenheim Museum in 2019; and Detroit activist Ingrid LaFleur on her project AFROTOPIA. In addition to this, Panaram interviewed scholars who are pushing the fields of African Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies in new and exciting directions such as Tao Leigh Goffe, Yomaira Figueroa, Kaneesha Parsard, Randi Gill-Sadler, Ainehi Edoro, and Nijah Cunningham.
At Fordham, Dr. Panaram currently teaches a section of Texts and Contexts called “Treasure(d) Maps, Black Women, and Southern Literature,” which focuses on Black feminist theory and cartography in Black women’s literature. Panaram says it is important to her that “students understand that what we study together in the classroom--in this case, Black feminism and Black women’s literature--is not divorced from the world we live in and in fact, helps us imagine and build more just worlds.” Through close reading and the study of para-textual materials, such as maps, Panaram seeks to broaden her students’ definitions of literature as a concept. She has also spearheaded a speaker series bringing scholars of Black feminist theory to Fordham. So far the series has hosted Professor Jennifer C. Nash (Duke University) in the fall and will feature Salamishah Tillet (Rutgers University) in Spring 2021. She hopes that this series will help students draw connections between the study of Black feminism and its real-world applications.
As for future plans, Panaram has begun work on a book manuscript examining rewritings of the Middle Passage by African American and Carribean writers such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Octavia E. Butler; the same writers who inspired her to study English literature in the first place. Through this project, Panaram aims to show “how Black women craft their texts to illustrate mobilities that outlive the transatlantic slave trade and continue to inform Black life today.”
While Dr. Panaram admits that it is “a strange time to be starting a new position,” she feels grateful toward her colleagues and students in the English Department as well as Fordham as a whole for welcoming her. “It is a true gift to be part of a department actively invested in thinking about how to develop and sustain intellectual and creative spaces for current students, alumni, and faculty at this particular moment,” she says. Commenting on the full-circle nature of her work at Fordham, Panaram says, “I grew up in the Bronx and after ten years of living in Washington, DC and Durham, NC to attend Georgetown University and Duke University, I am thrilled to join Fordham University and do the work that I do in a community, the Bronx, so very dear to me.”