Fields of Interest
Biography
Areas of Specialization
- 20th & 21st-century African American Culture
- Black Studies | Philosophy &Theory
- Feminist Theory
- Literary Criticism
Activities and Interests
My scholarship is in African American literary studies of the 20th and 21st centuries. My work closely examines literary texts in order to consider how fictional and nonfictional narratives treat emergent forms of thought and social contradictions during the moment of their production. My most recent book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press, 2021), tracks how age for people of the Black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Black Age argues that over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the Black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to liberal humanist measures of time on various scales. Constituted through processes of violence and reasoning that alienated bodies from historical, developmental, and legal schedules of time, Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. My first book, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), argues that the multiracial movement of the 1990s and 2000s was symptomatic of irreconcilable and disavowed losses of second-wave feminism, evidenced in the foreclosure of interracial feminist alliances.