Chinosole Chinosole, PhD
Visiting Research Fellow (2011-2012)
Chinosole (her name means "Freedom" in an Angolan language) is a retired Associate Professor Emerita from San Francisco State University. During her time as a visiting fellow, Chinosole is writing her biography. The work in progress, titled Homing in Flight, covers her life from being an adopted child in the Bronx, to her student days in Virginia and Wisconsin, to imprisonment in Angola (in a room full of accused but not legally charged detainees), to her tumultuous career as a black academic activist at SFSU. It also covers her time as a teacher in Zambia at Nkrumah Teachers' College, where she met her partner, an Angolan freedom fighter who gave her the name Chinosole.
In 1970 Chinosole served as the first acting dean of what is now the University of California's Ethnic Studies department and as a full-time professor in Black Studies. In 1989 she served as Chair of Women and Gender Studies. She specialized in the literatures of the African Diaspora with an emphasis on Black feminist theory and literature and autobiography.
- Chinosole. African Diaspora and Autobiographics: Skeins of Self and Skin. Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2001.
- Chinosole, ed. Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prison. Afrikan/Black Prison Education Fund, 1996.