Edlie Wong

Edlie Wong

Type
Dissertation Fellow
Department
English
2002-03

Edlie Wong, a Ph.D. candidate in English, uses in her dissertation postcolonial theory and cultural feminism as strategies for analyzing the condition of the fugitive and the constitutive effects of that state upon gendered and raced personhood. Wong’s study, titled Fugitive Subjects: Gender, Empire, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, explains how travel for slaves and former slaves is less a literary trope than a “transformative journey”: “a dynamic process, located in physical and psychological terrain, that constructs female subjects with public voices." Wong examines texts marginal to canonical literary analyses to open and expand the critical vocabulary of nineteenth-century travel, and in the process re-evaluates contemporary discussions of gender and political identity.