I work at the intersection of democratic theory, Black and anticolonial political thought, and social movement studies. I am particularly interested in exploring activist practice as a source and a site of political theorizing, and in the ethics and politics of resistance (nonviolent, violent, and otherwise) under conditions of colonial and racial domination. My earlier work focused on reconstructing the way Civil Rights organizers and activists — alongside and engaged with anticolonial movements around the globe — cultivated civil disobedience as a practice of radical disruption, critical disclosure, and self-liberation, in hopes of decolonizing and rebuilding the world.
My new work, some of which is detailed below, picks up on some of these threads to reexamine the politics of the “internal colony”; the vision of self-emancipation shared by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frantz Fanon; and the ambivalent consequences of policing’s spectacles of violence.
New Projects & Works in Progress
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The Mississippi Runs into the Mekong: Colonial Collisions & Recursions
This project reexamines the analytic purchase and political entailments of the “internal colony” — long maligned as an inadequate analogy for racial domination in the United States — by rooting it in the Black radical activist praxis out of which it emerged. As SNCC organizers encountered the problem of the Vietnam War within emerging discourses of Black America as part of the Third World, they turned to the language of internal colonialism not simply to analogize their suffering to colonized peoples, but in an effort to name the political collisions and recursions that crisscrossed the boundaries between foreign and domestic, subjecting differently situated peoples to constitutively linked forms of racial-colonial violence.
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To Remake the World: Frantz Fanon & Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Practice of Decolonization
This project asks what is lost by positioning Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frantz Fanon at opposite ends of a spectrum defined by the question of insurgent (non)violence. I argue that this positioning tends to reproduce a colonial schema in which the question of (non)violence becomes salient and visible only in the act of resistance, rather than in the structures of domination. Indeed, there is much to be gained from reading them together, as figures articulating overlapping dimensions of a shared project. Out of a diagnosis of the disastrous, world-building and self-shaping capacities of racial and colonial violence, Fanon and King together theorize decolonization as grassroots praxis—offering forms of liberatory, collective action that promise to remake the world.
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Displays of Force: Black Rebellion & the Spectacular Violence of Police
“The whole world is watching.” Perhaps no phrase better encapsulates our hopes for what might be politically possible when the ordinary violence of police becomes an extraordinary public spectacle. But what is the shape of the world that is watching, and what is the political work performed by such a spectacle within it? This project interrogates the spectacle of police violence as an ambivalent multiplicity: a set of complex displays and encounters that solicit a variety of affective responses and inaugurate contradictory political possibilities. fed through the logics of white supremacy, the scene of the “protest” is never fully free from the scene of the “riot”; the victims of the violence are also readily interpretable as aggressors; and the retaliatory and repressive violence of policing invites not just moral outrage but also rationalization, distancing, and eager identification with cruelty.