Kela Nnarka Francis is an assistant professor at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her PhD in Caribbean Literature from Howard University in 2012 and continues to research topics in Caribbean literature, culture, and society. She is particularly interested in the secular rituals in the Caribbean and the wider African diaspora.

 

Some of her publications, available at https://u-tt.academia.edu/KelaFrancis, include: The African Masking Process (2015), “Beyond Genre: Black Elements in Radiohead's ‘Bloom’ or Black Music/White Music, What's the Difference?” (2017), “The Spirituality of Carnival: Using Yoruba Cosmology to Read The Dragon Can’t Dance” (2015), “From Old World Gods to New World Ritual: Kamau Brathwaite’s Islands.” (2014), “Approaching Literature from an ‘African World View’: A Reading of Masks and Masquerades in Purple Hibiscus” (2013), and the chapter “Calypso Poetics” in A Companion to African Rhetoric (2022). Currently she is working on a monograph on the Ritual of Carnival: The Litany of a National Ritual.

 

Her other projects include an essay on the influence of the Black Power Movement on calypso--“TTBAM: The Music of the Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago”—and an upcoming article on Winston Bailey, the Mighty Shadow—“Yoruba concept of Cool and the Oxymoronic Philosophy of Dreadness.”