Rashana Vikara Lydner

Rashana Vikara Lydner is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in French and Francophone Studies with a designated emphasis in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Davis, and a Bachelor’s in French and Spanish with a minor in Psychology from The State University of New York Brockport. Bridging the fields of Caribbean Studies, French cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and Creolistics, her research focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black popular culture in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean at the intersections of language, identity, and power. 

Her published works include “Decolonizing Creolistics Through Popular Culture” in Decolonizing Linguistics (Oxford University Press), “S’habiller Sexy en Body String: The French Guianese bad gyal and the Image of French Caribbean Women” in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and “‘Mwen Enmé’W’ [I Love You]: Black Queer Women’s Social Positioning in the French Caribbean” (forthcoming) in Gender and Language. 

She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Dancehall ka joué: Gender and Sexual Politics at Play in French Guiana. Dancehall ka joué asserts that dancehall artists in French Guiana employ subversive performances of their gender and sexual identities to contest French Caribbean societal norms. In addition, by identifying with a trans-Caribbean culture, they challenge notions of non-belonging and Frenchness as they carve out their own space in the French nation-state.