Department Welcomes Macharia to Faculty

Keguro Macharia (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2008) joins the Department as Assistant Professor of English.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Macharia traveled to the United States for his undergraduate and graduate education. Macharia now moves from Illinois to Maryland. "My sister tells me to add, 'Just like Obama!'", he says. Macharia started as a poetry scholar. "Twentieth-century American poetry remains my first love. When I entered graduate school, I was asked to choose among many interests -- African American studies, Queer studies, Postcolonial studies, and African literatures -- and couldn't. Fortunately, I entered the academy when interdisciplinary work was increasingly possible and valued."

Macharia expects to maintain his polymathic approach at Maryland, as he continues to research global overlaps and disconnects within the literature of the Black diaspora. "As I use the term, interdisciplinarity is marked by time and space, not simply joining, say English to Anthropology or History to Pyschoanalysis, but considering how these fields are located," says Macharia. "For instance, Frantz Fanon is born in Martinique, studies in France, and travels to Algeria, where he joins the anti-colonial resistance. To understand Black Skins, White Masks, his best-known work, requires that we read its disciplinary histories (psychiatry, pyschoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics) alongside its geo-historical production (Martinique, France, Algeria)."

Macharia cites Claude McKay's Banana Bottom as another example. Written while McKay was in Morocco, Banana Bottom is set in Jamaica, was published in New York, and circulated in France. "I'm interested in how these transnational circuits of production and dissemination impact our reading protocols and interpretive strategies," says Macharia.

Macharia's current work-in-progress is titled "The Queer Black Diaspora: Race and Sexuality 1885-1960." This research project tracks the intimate dimensions of influential transnational Black figures writing in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.  "I take up the question of how figures such as Fanon and McKay move through space, and how that movement, diaspora in a word, is an intimate structure. I argue that sexuality has been as integral as race in shaping the historical, cultural, and conceptual notion of diaspora," says Macharia. Besides Fanon and McKay, Macharia is exploring the transnational lives of Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jomo Kenyatta.

In his life outside of Susquehanna Hall, Macharia is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective, formed in the aftermath of Kenya's turbulent post-election violence in 2008. "We are a loose assemblage of academics and creative writers, journalists and film makers, who both analyse and create new paradigms for understanding Kenyan history, culture, and society.

This semester, Macharia will be teaching English 301, "Critical Methods in the Study of Literature," and English 368A, "The Black Diaspora."