Creative Writing Specialization Featured Faculty Interview: Dr. Cathy Thomas

Dr. Cathy Thomas (she/her) is a recently hired Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English working on Contemporary Transnational Caribbean/Black Diaspora culture and literature, Caribbean carnival culture and practices, decolonial feminist thought, and discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, cosplay, carnival, and pop culture. She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Creative Writing working with Nalo Hopkinson; she received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Literature, her MFA in Fiction from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a B.A. in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology from Wesleyan University.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr.Thomas this last fall during her first term of teaching at UC Santa Barbara. Our conversation gave me a glimpse into the sense of home that Thomas carries into her critical and creative work. She shared with me the impact of growing up in the South Bronx in a Caribbean household. Her adolescence was molded by New York’s melting pot of cultures that included African American, Italian, South Korean, Sikh Indian, Panamanian, and many Caribbean and Afro-Latino cultures like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. This diaspora of peoples shaped her world view and her interdisciplinary research methods. She hopes to carve out her space at UC Santa Barbara as a Caribbeanist and as an educator, witnessing academia evolve with women of color at the forefront of the conversation. 

Dr. Thomas’ academic background is in literature, but as an interdisciplinary researcher, she finds ways to bridge performance studies, art practice and even scientific methodologies into her work. One of her projects includes the Caribbean Carnival, a five day music, dance and cultural festival where she studies participants' chemical responses to joy. She is curious about how the brain reacts to joy in spaces created by and for people of color. Her research also involves Caribbean carnival masquerade and cosplay which opens up her work to performance studies. She noted that with performance studies, “literary work becomes less flat, less two-dimensional; it has more breath to it.” 

Pictured: One half of a pair of shoes for the design called “West Indian Primer” based on Nelson’s West Indian Primer, a twentieth-century British grammar book used in the Caribbean to teach/encode Anglicized phonetics to Caribbean children.

Poco Más, the speculative fiction novel Thomas is currently working on, is also based in Caribbean culture. The title itself has a couple of meanings: Poco Más, meaning a little bit more, and it’s also a shortened nickname for “post-colonial masquerade.” There is a chapter in the novel that focuses on forced and chosen diaspora of the indigenous Taino peoples of the Caribbean, the runaway slaves and the European peoples who arrived there in the 18th century to work. This idea of Caribbean diaspora is channeled into the novel through a narrative about a pair of shoes that are made of items that washed up ashore after a post-cataclysmic event. The people who found the items on the shore are trying to reconstruct the culture of the Caribbean from the past or what would be present day for us, through the construction of these shoes. 

She takes this narrative of the shoes out of the book and into real life through art pieces that supplement the novel in a physical and visceral form. The shoes have a heel made of a metronome which becomes a conversation about music and the Caribbean. These interactive art pieces go alongside her novel as a way for her to tell the story of the Caribbean and for it to be learned beyond the pages of a book. “I can’t see myself sticking to my novel as the only medium that I’m working with,” Thomas said. 

In working with music, costumes and salvaged items to build the experience of these shoes, Thomas is creating a multi-faceted and non-linear narrative. She thinks about these objects as part of the meta-narrative. Thomas goes on to say, “my methodology is very much empirical. The thing that undergirds it is thinking about narrative as a meta-narrative. So these objects, these adornments, these weighted items are a part of the meta-narrative creating the text that I write creatively and critically”. She is telling the story of the Caribbean in a non-linear format, and through various mediums. This multidisciplinary and multimodal exploration offers Thomas the opportunity to explore her personal history and to return home through her work. 

When I asked Thomas about moving to California, she shared an anecdote about grocery shopping, which also offered insight into her research methodology. She already knew where to go grocery shopping because of the cultures she grew up around in the Bronx. She looks at the color of the people on the street and the language business signs are written in to figure out what she is going to find in the local grocery stores. “You go to Asian food markets, the Latin markets and if you’re lucky the African or East Indian markets. That’s how I stock my refrigerator and it's interesting because that is basically how the Caribbean is sort of indexed… The migration population of the Caribbean is sort of composed of what my grocery errand afternoons would look like in California.” The cultures from her home background continue to spill into her critical and theoretical work she is engaging in, just as the geography of the Caribbean shows up in her grocery cart. 

In graduate school Thomas was told she had a lot to “contribute to the conversation,” note the air quotes. She went on to say, as women of color, we are often told we have a lot to contribute, but it is always in an extractive way; our academic contributions are often distilled down into ideas that become acceptable to the western heternormative culture. Thomas took the encouragement from her professors and doubled down on her divergent interests. It is Thomas’ right to be at the forefront of such intersectional work in academia as she brings life to these disciplines that traditionally make you conform to the preset theory.

Thomas said that her background from the Bronx, “all the different people, the color, the texture,” and knowing that she was a non-traditional student helped ease the anxiety of conforming to a specific category at the start of her graduate school career. “The discipline itself wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to do with itself,” Thomas continues, “because I think at that point, in like maybe the past 5 or 10 years, the humanities is having a reckoning with diversity, equity, inclusion and trying to figure out how their curriculum is going to be relevant to the new face of learners, especially in California, and for that matter when the learners become educators.”

In her classroom, Thomas is bringing women of color feminism into conversation with comic books, modern American literature and STEM fields. Her work is helping students of color see themselves in the pedagogies she introduces in her syllabi.

As of now, Thomas is still figuring out the shapes and spaces her work will take. She sees herself as doing the busywork of a stagehand behind the scenes, “while we know the academy is onstage scrambling trying to figure out what courses they're going to offer this year and how this new Black or Brown person can bring diversity to the syllabi.” She said that the learners and educators can have equal share in the shaping of knowledge production and in the new forms it is taking today in academia.

The notion of the learners becoming the educators continues to resonate with me after our interview. As a woman of color alumna of UCSB, I am grateful to all of the women of color who continue to carve spaces in academia and beyond, creating pathways for intersectional thinking. 

It becomes a meta-narrative, as Thomas would say, to be a woman of color myself as a communications specialist, writing about another woman of color in academia for a center that celebrates Xicana[x] indigenous thought, art and social praxis. Thomas’ work in Caribbean studies is an example of how ways of learning once considered antiquated are evolving within academia as women of color become the leading educators. Thomas believes that there is definitely something to be said about referencing or deferring to elements from the past that have sustained our communities in education, to understand how they have served us and to avoid repeating any of the same mistakes. 

This spring quarter, Thomas will be teaching ENGL 122RC: Reading the Caribbean through Carnival. She is also working on the Women in Carnival Symposium this upcoming Wednesday, May 25th from 10am - 5pm at the University Center. More details to come.