Chloé Avril

Institution/Department: English Department
Previous studies: University Lumière Lyon II, France; University of Gothenburg
Thesis: ”Who Should Know but the Woman?”: Sexuality, Marriage and Motherhood in the Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Research areas: American Literature, Women’s Studies, Popular Culture, Literature and Society, Black Power
Current research: I am at present doing research into the autobiographies written by members of the Black Power movement in the USA (1965-1975). I am particularly interested in the dramatic elements the writers of these memoirs use in order to narrate their lives, sometimes sharing characteristics with the genre of crime fiction. I will also be exploring the tensions that these texts bring into relief between the individual and collective selves, something particularly relevant for the autobiographies of political activists. This current project ­situates itself within a recent revival of scholarly interest in the Black Power movement which has until now been either neglected or demonized as the
self-destructive successor of the American Civil Rights movement. As part of this renewal of interest, I have recently written an article on the modern representation of the 1965 Watts (Los Angeles) riots in Walter Mosley’s 2005 detective novel Little Scarlet, which is included in David Bell and Gerald Porter’s collection Riots in Literature (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).

E-mail address: chloe.avril@eng.gu.se