Jamie McGhee
BIOGRAPHY
Jamie McGhee is a writer who explores how racial otherness is constructed, deconstructed and policed around the world. She is the author of several books, most recently “You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge” (co-authored with Dr. Adam Hollowell of Duke University).
Delving into the complexities of African diasporic identities, Jamie analyzes Black liberation through historically grounded graphic novels; her upcoming “Not Light, But Fire” honors African American Civil War hero Mary Bowser, and “Dandara of Xango” documents the philosophy of Afro-Brazilian revolutionary Dandara dos Palmares.
She also writes to educate younger readers. “What I Must Tell the World” highlights the queerness and creativity of Lorraine Hansberry, while the multipart series “Exploring Civil Rights” introduces students to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Jamie was named a James Baldwin Writer-in-Residence at La Maison Baldwin (France). She has also been awarded artist fellowships at Künstlerdorf (Germany), Instituto Sacatar (Brazil) and Blue Mountain Center (USA), among others.
Now based in Berlin, Jamie teaches writing workshops for Ph.D. students at Humboldt University while completing a novel about internal colonization and cultures of remembrance.
PROJECT
Jamie McGhee will be completing the final draft of “Where Language Was Lost,” a multilingual novel tracing internal colonization and cultures of remembrance in postwar Berlin. Drawing on twentieth-century German Sprachpolitik in present-day Namibia, the novel asks, “How does a colonial power’s language policy dictate how political atrocities are perceived, archived and remembered?”
“Where Language Was Lost”: When a war-torn city government interns foreigners and imposes a shibbolethian language test to determine national “purity,” a functionary fights to save the immigrant families around him. New linguistic systems emerge when cultures converge. By evolving its language, this speculative novel calls on readers to question their own assumptions about language and invites them to actively unmake their own implicit biases.
Jamie will be completing the final draft in Morocco because of the country’s history with colonialism, as negotiated through Darija: Amazigh, French and Spanish intertwine to reflect centuries of migration, assimilation and revolution.