Natalie Reinhart

Project Coordinator
Working Group: Insurgent Domesticities

Natalie Reinhart is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. She is the managing editor of PREE Literary Magazine in Kingston, Jamaica, and worked as an editorial assistant for Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism from 2016-2019.  Her dissertation thesis is funded by the Lindt Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  

Her dissertation focuses on the "uncontrollable" law in Jamaica, and constructs a socio-legal genealogy of the legislation to argue that such offenses were integral to Jamaica's colonial state formation immediately following Emancipation. She interrogates how such laws have become a discursive staging ground where Caribbean postcolonial modernity, national identity, and international human rights are debated— mobilized around the double-edge of an “uncontrollable” girl’s perceived social vulnerability and threat. Building on work in vagrancy, which positions the runaway as an intervention in the literature and theory of the flâneur, she thinks through girlhood as a critical category and an intellectual tradition.