ABOUT ME
I am an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature and culture. Across each of my projects, I am interested in the ideological breadth and depth of black intellectual thought, the political strategy and formal innovation catalyzed by instrumentalizing culture, and the historically unstable definitions of race and community. Put simply, I study how black cultural producers facilitate and respond to shifts in the conceptual and ideological deployments of race—specifically, blackness—across formal and informal arenas. My work regularly engages with literature, film, history, critical theory, and performance studies.
My first book project, Who’s Laughing Now?: Race Making in Post-Civil Rights Black Literary Satire, develops an argument about the centrality of humor practices to formal shifts in black expressive cultures—especially, the novel—after 1968. Against the historical backdrop of post-civil rights retrenchment, Who’s Laughing Now? provides a literary-historical account of a nearly forty-year zeitgeist characterized by the substantial outpouring of black satirical writing. In such writing, black writers instrumentalize humor to stage outmoded forms of literary racial representation, to abjure the strictures of protest literature, to energize critiques from disreputable social positions, to lampoon liberal whites (and sometimes blacks) and the styles of fiction they demand from black writers, and to travesty corrupting developments within black communities themselves.