Alabama Rose Calkin

I graduated from the University of York in 2018 with a first class BA in History. During my undergraduate studies, I became interested in the dialectical role of borders in sovereignty and nation-building; how they are essential in the delineation of the nation-state and in the distinguishing of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ although they are necessarily located at the margins of the space they demarcate, both physically and culturally. Border regions and the people that inhabit them often contravene conventional notions of the nation-state whilst simultaneously being central to conceptions of national identity and security. Borderland communities construct cross-cultural and multidimensional identities across political, cultural and geographic boundaries, contesting binary notions of nationality, identity and belonging, especially in relation to migration and displacement. I also became interested in the use of literary texts in historical study, and how these sources can reflect historical realities in ways that go beyond the limits of the 'conventional' archive. My undergraduate dissertation explored the Dominican-Haitian borderlands through literary representations of the 1937 Haitian Massacre.

At Columbia and LSE, I focused on conceptions of the Caribbean as a borderlands space—a point of entanglement for a wide range of historical, political, social and cultural forces—and the kinds of ideas and literature this produces. My master’s dissertation looked at the Martinican journal Tropiques, positioning it as Caribbean borderlands literature that served as a form of literary resistance to cultural marginality, colonial assimilation, and Vichy oppression, which attempted to capture Martinican and Caribbean identity in all its multitudes. Tropiques’ writers imagined radical and emancipatory futures that never came to pass, but in doing so they revolutionised Caribbean literature, and their impact can be seen in cultural and intellectual movements in both the Caribbean and beyond.

I am currently based in London, working for The National Archives and as a freelance historical research assistant.