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.
Black Alchemy: Dirt, Soil and Other Dark Matter turns 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 this book, as extraction is both a context for and the practice of modernity and its afterlives. In the book, I interrogate how earthly matter emerges as an aesthetic, material, and social category, asking: what does dirt, soil, and other dark matter allow us to theorize in tandem with Middle Passage epistemologies? What refusals emerge from them? And what kinds of alchemy did Black people practice upon them?