Rashana Lydner

Ph.D., University of California, Davis, French and Francophone Studies with a designated emphasis in African Diaspora Studies.
M.A., French, University of California, Davis.
B.A., French and Spanish, Summa Cum Laude, minor in Psychology, State University of New York Brockport.

Dr. Rashana Vikara Lydner is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work bridges the fields of African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, Cultural studies, and Creolistics. She focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black popular culture in the francophone and the anglophone Caribbean at the intersections of language, identity, and power. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, she examines race, gender, sexuality, and the co-naturalization of race and Creole languages. At the core of her research is her passion for Creole languages in the Caribbean basin.

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

Dr. Lydner is currently working on her first book manuscript Dancehall ka joué: Gender and Sexual Politics at Play in French Guiana that stems from her dissertation work: Performing Otherness in Guyanais Dancehall: An Analysis of the Rude Bwoy and Bad Gyal Personas.In Dancehall ka joué, she examines the diffusion of dancehall music, culture, and language from Jamaica to the French Overseas department and region, French Guiana. In a region that is often let out of conversations on Frenchness, individuals in French Guiana reveal how dancehall offers them the opportunity to forge belonging within a global Black music and culture. Rather than identifying with Frenchness and the tumultuous politics of French republicanism that refuses to recognize difference, they see in dancehall a place and space to forge a trans-Caribbean identity.

Research Interests

• Black French Studies (colonialism, cultural production, intellectual thought, & Caribbean literature)
• Caribbean Identity (masculinities and femininities)
• Black popular culture (music & ​Social Media discourse)
• Creolistics [the study of creole languages] (language & racialization, language & globalization, language & gender, code-switching , bivalency)