This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
This dissertation explores the entanglements of performed refusals and witnessing practices in the face of gendered violences. I analyze how contemporary artists use staged performance to generate new modes for witnessing histories of gendered violence across temporal and national boundaries. In particular, I investigate four performances addressing local histories of...
Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
The dissertation project considers the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges from a sustained consideration of different forms of difficult racial and sexual intimacies. The artists whose work is engaged throughout the project, Leasho Johnson, Ajamu X, and NIC Kay recognize that to be Black is to always...
Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
“Coalitional Aesthetics” argues that leftist literary works of the 1930s enacted bonds of solidarity across racial, linguistic, and geographic divides, modeling alternative, non-hierarchical modes of social cohesion. Building on Gramsci’s concept of the coalitional, coalitional aesthetics refers to a set of formal characteristics that insist on the specificity of the...
Black women performers have made, and continue to make, contributions to the U.S.-avant-garde performance canon and Black performance traditions that go largely unaccounted for in academic studies. Research has shown that across temporalities, Black women performers have mobilized experimental avant-garde aesthetics to disrupt and refuse essentialized notions of Blackness in...
This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a...
This dissertation explores black litigation strategies, black legal culture, and the effect of black litigation on civil law. Not only did African Americans sue white southerners and white-owned companies for white-on-black violence under Jim Crow, they shared their collective legal knowledge through a network of black newspapers and contributed to...
My dissertation, Geographies of Memory, Trauma, and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean-American Literature examines the geographies of the cane fields, bodies of water, and the back porch to illustrate the speculative ways anti-black violence, intergenerational trauma, pleasure and Black memory co-exist in Black literature. Examining the aforementioned geographies as...