Overview
Jehan L. Roberson is a writer, educator, and artist using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary scholarship and art practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s research takes the early 20th century proliferation of Black literary movements as its genesis. She explores transnational Black allegiances and solidary between the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and Negrismo and their concerted effort to map Blackness into the global memory in ways that disrupt colonial systems of racial categorization. She is deeply interested in global Black literature, postcolonial literature, Black geographies, queer theory, performance studies, and radical archives. Her time as the Collections Specialist for the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, a digital, trilingual repository of performance practices in the Americas, informs this work.
Her writing has been published in Public Books, Women & Performance, Apogee, ZORA, emisférica, and Autostraddle, among others. She is a member of the editorial collective for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and a former editor of Ampersand, the journal's experimental section. Jehan is a 2017 and 2018 Public Performance Art fellow with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and is the founder of Latitudes, an artistic organization exploring Black radical literary archives in the Americas.