Usha Rungoo

Research and teaching interests: Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean Literatures; material and embodied histories; the use of autoethnography, fiction and imagination in rewriting colonized identities, cartographies and histories; extractive capitalism; the militarization and nuclearization of islands; past and present coerced labor systems and migrations; climate change and environmental justice.

Usha Rungoo is a Mauritian-American scholar, teacher, speaker and creative writer. As an African immigrant of indenture descent, a former first-generation college student from a low-income family, and a single mother, her work is at the intersection of the personal and the political. She is currently at work on two academic manuscripts: at the core of both is the idea that Global South islands have been and continue to be used as colonial laboratories, but that material and embodied sites of history and memory such as landscapes, organic matter or humor can offer avenues for restorative justice.

Her first book project, Sirandann Archipelago, considers the sirandann, a transarchipalegic oral practice emerging from enslaved and indentured communities in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, and rooted in island landscapes, as an alternative to identitarian and aesthetic (and heavily intellectualized) metaphors such as the rhizome, the mangrove or the coral. Her project centers sirandann as fertile ground for conceptualizing decolonial island identities and cartographies, and as a potentially novel way of reading literature. Showing, through autoethnography, that the spirit of the sirandann survives in the speech, humor and worldview of her own working-class family and community, her book seeks to come up with a new hermeneutics, different from those based on the upper- and upper-middle sensibilities of the academy’s prescribed readings. This project is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.

Her second book project, The Laboratory Island, follows the history of the Global South island from its use as a colonial laboratory for various labor systems (slavery, indenture, blackbirding, and penal labor) and as a philosophical laboratory in literature and popular culture to its current instrumentalization within the tourism and military industrial complexes. The project then re-centers local island literatures, to read them as both aesthetic objects and works of advocacy. It asks whether the discursive laboratory generated by these literatures can offer a different worldview to potentially rewrite the narrative of the island as laboratory.

Her academic publications have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Yale French Studies, and Interculturels.Francophonies.

Professor Rungoo is at work on a novel, structured around the materiality of tea leaves which ties the pleasures of the beverage to its violent, colonial history. She was the regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa in 2024 for her short story, “Dite”, published in Granta. In 2021, her piece, “The Song of Life”, was shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and was published in Wasifiri.