During the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods, Black authors were concerned with white antipathy towards the political aspirations of African Americans. For many of these authors, sonic figures of resonance, vibration, and musicality served as the key sensory modalities through which the nexus of American anti-Blackness and civil politics could be...
ABSTRACT On the Other Side of Babylon: Black Women and Epistemologies of Resistance in the Third World Women’s Alliance Assata Sankofa Kokayi This cultural and intellectual history analyzes the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), its relationship with decolonization struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and positionality as an anti-imperialist...
“Repurposing Queens: Excavating a Black Feminist Eco-ethic in a Time of Ecological Peril,” articulates how Black feminist theories of race, gender, and science critique both conservative and liberal trends in environmentalism and environmental studies. The project is transnational in scope in that it analyzes figures/objects from the United States and...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and The Insistence of Black Life examines the mercurial, though seemingly fixed, notion of evidence as it is brought into relation with anti-blackness, Black death and, ultimately, Black life. They Left Us Dead queries how and why certain forms of documentation and...
This dissertation takes up Islam’s relationship to Black nationalism across the Atlantic diaspora of Muslims that I call “the Fugitive Islamicate.” Scholars most often have described this relationship as commencing in the twentieth century with the rise of “Black Muslim religion,” a U.S. religious movement that begins with Noble Drew...
Over a decade has passed since Hurricane Katrina impacted the Gulf Coast. The city of New Orleans, was one of the more severely damaged areas in the region, experiencing 80% damage. This dissertation analyzes the rebuilding of New Orleans and it questions the role that colonial legacies play in that...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...