Cole Nelson

Biography

B.A. Film & Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

M.A. Cinema & Media Studies, The Media School, Indiana University

Cole Nelson’s dissertation, titled “Dissidence After Independence: Activist Media and the Re-Making of the Caribbean” investigates the political openings made available to and by Caribbean activist-intellectuals in the postcolonial period through the creation and circulation of documents such as the radical newspaper. Attentive to the convergence of radical imaginations and material realities in the document work of Caribbean New Leftists, this dissertation asks, what forms of social life does that document work bring into being?

Exploring the Black Radical Tradition and its radical print cultures in the anglophone Caribbean, “Dissidence After Independence” foregrounds the means through which a transnational constellation of activist-intellectuals cohered itself and, simultaneously, contributed to popular reimaginings of Caribbean self-determination. 

Nelson’s M.A. thesis, titled “Corresponding with the Revolution: Correspondence and the Challenges of A ‘Workers’ Paper’,” provided a cultural and political history of the Detroit-based newspaper Correspondence, a paper that emerged out of the collaborative efforts of C.L.R James, Grace Lee and James Boggs, and Raya Dunayevskaya, among others. The thesis considers the particular affordances offered to these renegade radicals by the newspaper form and investigates the widely dialogic use made of the newspaper, blurring the distinctions between reader and writer, in Correspondence.