Quiet Zone

PETAL KIMBERLY SAMUEL is assistant professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work on African diasporic women’s writing, Caribbean feminist and queer literary aesthetics, and Black speculative imagination has appeared in the Journal of West Indian Literature, The Black Scholar, Differences, and Public Books. Her current work and scholarly interests include Caribbean anticolonial literature and aesthetics, the sensorium, and transnational Black feminist thought.

"The Quiet Zone is a groundbreaking work of Black feminist criticism that redefines Caribbean soundscapes. With eloquence, rigor, and bold interdisciplinary insight, Petal Samuel reveals how Afro-Caribbean women and queer artists transform sonic disturbance into a powerful aesthetic of resistance, unsettling colonial fantasies and asserting radical forms of presence, creativity, and self-sovereignty." - Kaiama L. Glover, professor of Black Studies at Yale University "In this brilliant study, 'quiet,' 'noise,' and 'sound' are never just one thing. Restorative quiet and the aesthetic investment in beauty, subtlety, and modulation are deemed the exclusive domain of the deserving—violently denied to others as a mark of their dispossession. Sound may represent a respite from the violent scrutiny of state and nation, but also from those severe postures demanded of family and community to counter antiblackness. In astute readings of fiction, memoir, poetry, film, and performance across a range of archives and disciplinary methods, Petal Samuel takes us to unexpected places and conclusions, showing that we often desire that which we fear and inspiring us to listen—and to imagine—against the grain." - Faith Smith, professor of African and African American Studies, Brandeis University