My academic journey began with a detour.I went to France in 1986 simply to broaden my horizons as an English Literature major.As it turned out, I came back from Montpellier a year later with better French and an abiding interest in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.So, I switched to French my senior year. I was born in Hawaii and the tropical imprint I got during childhood has stayed with me.

As a young reader of Baudelaire, I was fascinated by his aesthetic refinement, the sensuality of his sense of place as well as the politics of modernity in his writing.Growing up in Hawaii, which felt very much like an American colony, made the transition from Les Fleurs du Mal to the poetry of the West Indian, Aimé Césaire, a stimulating development in graduate school.After years of reading French classics, discovering literatures in French from outside France opened a whole new terrain to which I felt a compelling connection. 

I went to primary school in Hawaii during the Vietnam War when racial tensions on the islands loomed especially large. As fate would have it, the Hawaiian sunshine allowed me to blend into the racial mix of various shades of brown with less trouble than the blonder folks in the white minority. I began to develop an awareness of the ambiguities of race, culture and identity as a school girl in Pearl City, where I also witnessed first-hand how American business ventures from pineapple to sugar cane combined with military ambitions lead to the brutal dispossession of the native Hawaiian people.Over the past decade, my intellectual engagement with colonialism and its legacy in Africa and the Caribbean is directly related to my own opposition to Western imperialism in all of its various forms.