Books
On Black Breath traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Deploying the concept Black breath as an analytic across multi-temporal and non-chronological avenues, it reads breath and breathing as foundational to the formation of “Blackness”—as both radical potential and as an object to be managed. Focusing on different phenomenologies of Black breathing in social and cultural texts throughout modernity and its afterlives, I consider how mundane and invisible phenomena become the site of insidiously powerful regimes of control. On Black breath moves through dimensions of Black life and explores the unexpected corners of capitalism, race science, cultural production, political engagement, and coalition making.
Dirt: Soil and Other Dark Matter revises the impulse to read metaphors of the oceanic as a singular heuristic for understanding Black movement, migration, and mobility throughout history. I turn to dirt for understanding how Blackness—a series of relations that have emerged as part of extractive and accumulative logics—has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism. Extraction, in particular, shapes the consideration of the book, as extraction is both a context for and the practice of modernity and its afterlives. In the book, I interrogate how dirt emerges as a minor aesthetic, material, and social category, asking: what does dirt allow us to theorize in tandem with Middle Passage epistemologies? What refusals emerge from the soil?