Brenda Tan is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Rice University. Her research engages anti/postcolonial theory, Global Anglophone literature, Caribbean literature, Caribbean cultural and economic criticism, value-theoretical and third-world Marxism(s), peripheral modernism, the novel form and black studies, with a particular interest in Afropessimism. Her dissertation theorizes literary irrealist abstraction in modernist Anglophone Caribbean novels as metonymy for the racialized mechanisms, particularly those pertaining to racial blackness, that mediate the Caribbean’s integration into the global economy. The dissertation makes the case for thinking about blackness as a constitutive negativity that endures in the capitalist totality not logically but historically, so that the proletariat recursively emerges from the aporia constituted by antiblackness. Her academic work can be found in The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies and is forthcoming in Social Text and the Routledge Companion to Literatures of Slavery.

Publications:

“Negative Dialectics of Blackness: Race, Class, and the Value Form in the Anticolonial Caribbean Novel,” Social Text (forthcoming).

Routledge Companion to Literatures of Slavery (forthcoming).

“Racial Conscription and Its Limits: Antinomies of Race in Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor,” Contemporary African Novelists in America, themed issue, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies (Autumn 2025).