Renee Landell

I am a fully-funded AHRC Techne doctoral researcher completing a full-time PhD in the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Alongside my studies, I perform scholar-activism in an independent capacity as founder of Beyond Margins UK, consulting as a race equity and justice expert, running events and campaigns and designing strategies for UK HE institutions, museums, charities and other organisations. I am also the co-founder of Black in Arts and Humanities (BiAH), a global online network, alongside Dr Leighan Renaud, Dr Hannah Robbins, and Dr Amber Lascelles.

My research interests include Carribean literature, Black diasporic writing, neo-slave narratives, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, decolonial theory, ecocriticism and African eco-justice practices. 

My Current Research

I am currently investigating the cause and effect of popular stereotypical images (‘Mammy’, ‘Jezebel’, ‘Mandingo’, etc.) and the counter-responses to them in Anglophone Caribbean neo-slave narratives, 1983-2020. I examine how the responses to, and demythologization of, Western stereotypes by Anglophone Caribbean writers is an attempt to reclaim the Caribbean body and promote positive ecological practices. Framed as exotic and erotic, the bodies of the indentured natives and diasporic slaves, once dominated and policed, are now being rewritten by Caribbean authors looking to both historicise their identity and liberate it from the internalised legacies of colonialism. Bringing together decolonial and ecocritical theories, I argue that the reconstruction of Black Caribbean identity requires both looking backwards to recuperate a suppressed history and forwards to attentive responses to the human and the environmental body. 

My fictional corpus includes: I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) by Grace Nichols, Cane Warriors (2020) by Alex Wheatle, The Book of Night Women (2009) by Marlon James, and Slave Song (1984) by David Dabydeen.

PhD [2019-23*] RHUL

MA by Research [2018] RHUL

BA, Hons [2017] RHUL

Member, Caribbean Studies Association (CSA)

Member, Society for Caribbean Studies (SCS)