research
Current Projects:
Queering the Aftermath: (Re)thinking Enactments of Queerness and (Post)colonial Legacies (Book)
Queering the Aftermath: Rethinking Enactments of Queerness and (Post)colonial Legacies, challenges assumptions of a transnational queerness that take the political strategies of U.S.- and European-based as the only means for challenging systems of social norms. In so doing, Queering the Aftermath urges the necessity of a sustained dialogue between the fields of postcolonial studies and queer studies. This book addresses the following questions: How might the forms of politics necessitated by life in a postcolonial nation alter the ways in which queerness is conceptualized and lived? What forms of politics, beyond the formation of political organizations and public demonstrations, might postcolonial queers employ as a means for challenging the specific cultural and social norms of their locations? Through readings of sub-Saharan African novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, short fiction produced by or explicitly portraying queer African individuals, and national legislation, such as the recent Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, I explore the gestures made towards postcolonial queer modes of resistance that fall outside the purview of the active political organization and resistance anticipated by queers in the Global North.
"Quest(ions) of the Erotic Child: Finding Pleasure in K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents."
(Journal Article)
This article is an adaptation of my dissertation chapter of the same title. In this article, much like in the dissertation chapter from which it originates, I rethink the colonial trope of the child as a potential form of resistance. I suggest that an embrace, and subsequent wielding of the trope of the child, presents a chance to “write back” against present (post-/neo-)colonial violences. Moreover, I suggest the erotic power of the child as an important quality for such writing back. Establishing South African author, K. Sello Duiker’s novel, Thirteen Cents, as an example, I argue that Azure, the novel’s protagonist, gains access to his erotic potential as he pushes beyond the social and psychological limits imposed by his childly figure. By refusing static interpretations, and insisting on finding new, and more fulfilling paths, Azure offers a challenge to the parent/child power dynamic that undergirds much of (post-/neo-)colonialism.
“Queer, Now: Queer Identity, the Mainstream, and the Threat of Forgetting.” (Journal Article)
Within the last two decades, there has been an exponential increase in mainstream discussions of LGBTQ issues. While shows like Modern Family, The Fosters, and, more recently, How to Get Away with Murder, have helped bring gay and lesbian faces into the homes of millions across the country, for many in the LGBTQ community, these mainstream images bring with them a limited sense of what it means to be queer. This paper argues that, while each new representation of queerness within mainstream media does great work to make the presence of queerness less surprising, we must resist the “myth of the mainstream”—this is to say, we must resist the tendencies of the mainstream to present archetyped (queer) figures. Examining queer character of Jamal Lyons, from the television show, Empire, I articulate how the increased visibility within the mainstream reflects an attempt to freeze and constrict the very nature of queerness, as such visibility works to incorporate queerness into the myth of the mainstream. Ultimately, I work to remind that the goal of queer has not been to gain acceptance by the status quo but to call into question the very principles of the status quo itself. As the histories of other minority movements have shown us, acceptance and visibility often are incomplete and misleading indicators of the movement’s successes.
Areas of Specialty
My areas of speciality include:
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African literatures
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African American literature
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postcolonial theory and literatures
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Queer of color critique
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Queer theory
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Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature
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Multi-ethnic American literatures
Publications
“Holding onto Hulk Hogan: Contending with the Rape of the Black Male Psyche in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” In Get Out, edited by Dawn Keetley. Columbus: Ohio State UP. (Forthcoming)
Analyzing the infamous “teacup” scene in Jordan Peele’s recent film, Get Out, this essay explores how, through the scene, Peele offers a highly effective visual representation of the psychological—and by extension, social and material—injury visited upon the black male’s sense of identity when black men are constantly (mis-)interpellated as men/boys. More specifically, by dramatizing the cultural discourse that continuously collapses the gap between black boyhood and black manhood, the “teacup” scene offers an effective means for visualizing not only the psychological damage such discourses effect on the black male identity but also the social and material consequences of this damage as well. I argue that the film’s dramatization serves as a haunting, yet effective critique of contemporary assertions of racial progress. Missy Armitage’s ambush hypnotism of Chris Washington is nothing short of molestation. As she forces her way into his memory and history, working to trap the adult Chris in his childhood trauma, not only does Missy dirty Chris’s memories of himself and his mother’s death but she also enacts a form of molestation of both the grown man Chris and the boy Chris via this coerced act of re-membering. In demonstrating how this psycho-molestation disrupts both Chris’s individual identity and his ability to function within his body and social environment, Peele returns to the present those who would seek to relegate the psychological warfare against black males to a distant past. Ultimately, I suggest that perhaps one of the most terrifying aspects of Peele’s recent film, Get Out, is its ability to so astutely foreground and so persuasively re-present what scholars and activists alike have been saying for years: we live in a society in which slavery simply changed names and taken up new tools.
“Real/Talk: Glenn Ligon’s Re-Membering of Queerness in (Post-)Black Discourse,” The Comparatist, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018: 80-97.
How do we talk about the intersections of blackness and sexuality when confronted with an ideologically color-blind, and sexually conservative society? Or, more specifically, how does racial difference come to relate to, and (re)shape queer difference in a society hell-bent on asserting race as “not important” or not really there? This essay addresses these questions, suggesting that in both post-blackness and pro-blackness discourses, attempts to (re)conceptualize racial difference often has been done in the context of heteronormative spaces and performative demands, and to the exclusion of black queer difference. Through an analysis of the work by visual artist, Glenn Ligon, I assert that, rather than participate in either the heteronormativization of blackness or in the privileging of sexuality over race, Ligon’s work gestures towards a discourse that takes neither race nor sexuality as divisible signifiers. Ultimately, I find that Ligon’s artworks through the complex and continual (re)negotiations between race, sexuality, and gender, while displacing and dispersing the burden of re-membering itself.
“A Warm, Wooly Silence: Rethinking Silence through To Molefe’s ‘Lower Main’ and Monica Arac de Nyeko’s ‘Jambula Tree.’” African Literature Today: Queer Theory in African Film and Fiction, vol. 36, no. 1, 2018: 110-122.
In the face of such crises as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, anti-homosexual violence, and widespread homophobia, it is no surprise that scholars and activists would be leery of silence. Often, this suspicion of silence is presented in the convenient and catchy formulation, ‘silence = death.’ While useful in certain contexts, this formulation is arguably grounded in the political and social logic of the Global North. Against this backdrop, this essay asks how such resistances to silence might preclude alternative strategies for coping with and challenging oppression? It becomes increasingly important to think of location-specific forms of resistance as queerness is analyzed and observed on an international scale. This paper directs its attention to enactments of queerness on the African continent. Through a reading of the silences in To Molefe’s ‘Lower Main’ and Monica Arac de Nyeko’s ‘Jambula Tree,’ I argue that silence is often an important and useful strategy of resistance. Both Molefe and Arac de Nyeko’s texts narrate intimate experiences in which silence becomes a useful tactic for sustaining queer desires in the face of attempts to set that desire as Other.
“‘I Remember You Was Conflicted’: Reflections on Black Panther, the African American/African Divide, and Scholarly Positioning.” Black Panther, special issue of Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 11, no. 9, 2018. 48-52.
This reflection addresses how my viewing of Coogler’s film, Black Panther, inspires me to rethink my scholarly position. Through the depiction of the antagonism between the African T’Challa and the African American Erik Killmonger, both of whom fight in the name of their people, the film makes it possible to visualize the costs of maintaining the gap seemingly dividing the two. As it challenges the terms of their division (e.g., “people,” “foreigner,” etc.), I find that the film’s representation of conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger offers a productive exploration of how to move beyond the divide that threatens to destabilize the unity of the “black” in Black Panther.
“Building an Empire: Queer Sacrifices in Lee Daniels’ Empire.” In Hero or Villain?: Essays on Dark Protagonists of Television, edited by Tamara Girardi and Abigail Scheg, 96-108. Jefferson: McFarland, 2017.
Recent queer scholarship has lamented contemporary lesbian and gay (LGBT) movements’ turn towards innocence as a tactic for gaining the acceptance of mainstream society. This tactic has become even more controversial as media representations of LGBT characters increase. This paper not only considers the limits of and sacrifices required by a deployment of such a tactic, but also the challenges racialized bodies pose to the very notion of innocence itself. Analyzing the gay protagonist, Jamal Lyons, in Lee Daniels’s hit show, Empire, I investigate the transition of Jamal’s character from his “innocent,” yet disavowed, “good guy” start to his corrupt, yet accepted, “bad boy” end. I argue that Jamal’s transition demonstrates the unsustainability of innocence as a tactic, while also making visible how race and gender are sacrificed to maintain the concept of innocence. Ultimately, I contend, innocence as a tactic might be more about leaving some behind than about bringing everyone closer together.)
"B(l)ack up on the Shelf: The Erasure of Queerness in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait." In Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past & Present, edited by Christopher Varlack, 191-206. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2017.
The main thrust of this paper responds to the questions of why black activist, Bayard Rustin, has been marginalized by history and what we forget when we forget him. I contend that Rustin has been pushed to the periphery, in part, because of a transition of black (American) bodies from one form of materiality (corporeality) to another form of materiality (capital-ism). This transition, I suggest, comes through the production of texts, such as King's Why We Can't Wait, which aimed to re-present blacks as productive—and (re)producing—American citizens. Furthermore, I propose that in forgetting Rustin, we risk suppressing a history of racism that posits the black body as the de facto site of abnormal sexuality—as the site of a raw, primal sexuality that acts as the negative of a “civilized” sexuality. In other words, in forgetting Rustin, we risk acquiescing to racist assumptions that black bodies not only carry sexual cues but that those cues are inherently heterosexual.