Research
Books
Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction
Duke University Press
Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the United States’ security ambitions since the Reagan administration. Drawing on black feminist, critical race, and queer of color theoretical traditions, the author posits that worldbreaking is an ethical and aesthetic orientation to the dangerous, worldmaking process of securitization—the process by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. Worldbreaking appears in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N. K. Jemisin, in the music and video work of Janelle Monáe, and also in unexpected places, such as the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Breaking the World charts the difference between securitization and “Black insecurity.” Not simply an opponent process or antithesis to securitization, Black insecurity is an apposite relation that synthesizes the anti-Blackness of security praxis with the power derived from Black collectivity. Rather than highlight the obliteration Black people face due to the increasingly securitized world, Breaking the World emphasizes that worldbreaking is an important aspect of the Black radical imagination, showing that speculation is an essential response to the dangerous worlds of securitization.
Articles
Black Study from the Middle of the World
American Quarterly
This forum essay engages Black studies’ investments in the environmental humanities and “Black Ecologies.”
Black Insecurity at the End of the World
MELUS
"Black Insecurity at the End of the World" examines the sensibility I term black insecurity by reading Colson Whitehead's 2010 novel Zone One against a backdrop of bioinsecurity and police murder of black people. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, from the same year, when situated in dialogue with Whitehead's text, show that black insecurity reframes the spatio-temporal notion of survival by unmasking security structures as dead and dying. Engaged from the standpoint of ongoing racial justice protests and stay-at-home conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, "Black Insecurity at the End of the World" argues that black speculative fictions uniquely expose the false premises of securitization and show that black love is an essential process for unmaking the forces of anti-Blackness.
Figuring Black Lives
American Quarterly
This forum essay examines how graphic fiction wrestles with the concern for Black lives in the context of contemporary regimes of anti-Blackness.
Pessimistic Futurism
Feminist Theory
This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn, which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking and writing black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience.
New Suns
ASAP Journal
This essay introduces a special issue of the ASAP Journal that assesses how speculative fiction relates to questions of racial and ethnic identity.
The ‘Vigilante Spirit’
Surveillance & Society
This article details the “vigilante spirit,” a term used by New York Governor Mario Cuomo to describe the seizure and execution of state power by Bernhard Goetz in his attack on four black teenagers in December of 1984. It argues that the vigilante spirit is an expression of thoughts, feelings, and practices that produce threats and then assemble the tools it deems necessary to combat them. It further argues that the vigilante spirit, expressed by Goetz in his attack, was also encoded in various cultural texts produced in the 1980s and uses Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns as an example. By reading these two case studies together, it seeks to explain the cultural politics that underpinned racial violence in the 1980s.
From Nothing to Something
Diaspora and Literary Studies
“What’s Your Emergency?”
Feminist Studies
This essay interrogates the phenomenon of white people calling the police on black people. It seeks to situate this phenomenon in the context of increased security and surveillance that have characterized the last forty years of American, and indeed, global life. The essay ends with a rumination on the power of humor to disrupt the potential violence of the policing of public space.