Principal Faculty

- Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself
- Title
- Assistant Professor
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
- Phone 0000000000
- Office Location
- Humanities Building 1, 428
- Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services
- Courses CRES 132: Black Speculations, CRES 120: Third World Feminisms, CRES 190C: Black Transnational, CRES 201: Exile & Diaspora
Biography, Education and Training
- My current book project, tentatively (re)titled "Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab," explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across twentieth century North Africa and Europe.
- I am particularly interested in how variable and contested articulations of blackness - from the Atlantic, Saharan, Mediterranean, and Nile worlds - are realised, reformed, resisted, and reimagined across anglophone, francophone, and arabophone cultural and political spheres. I approach this research by taking up a familiar canon of Black transnational narrative, festival, and sonic cultures, and rendering it unfamiliar by drawing upon its translations (and receptions) in other diasporic contexts: in particular, in and through Afro-Arab space(s).
- In relation and addition to this ongoing work, my teaching and research interests include African diasporic cultural politics and culture work, particularly in and of liberation movements; memory studies; literature, visual arts, and poetics of disaster, particularly in relation to Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora; nationalism and statelessness; representations of war in graphic novels and film; the intersections of race, colonialism, and sport; and Third Worldism.
- Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, I was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
Selected Publications
- "It Turns Out We Were Not All Pan-African During the World Cup." The Funambulist no. 46, "Questioning our Solidarities." (March-April 2023). 72-79.
- “Pan-African Performance and Possibility: Lessons from Algiers 1969.” The Funambulist no. 32, “Pan-Africanism.” November-December 2020. 28-33.
- Epilogue: “From Antigua to AlgeĢrie: The Particularity and Promise of the Afro-Arab.” Post45 Contemporaries, cluster on “Extraordinary Renditions,” edited by Kalyan Nadiminti. 11 September, 2020.
- “Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness.” Research in African Literatures, 50, no. 3 (Fall 2019), 91-115.
- “Who will we be when we are free? On Palestine and Futurity.” The Funambulist no. 24, “Futurisms.” July-August 2019. 22-27.
- "The 'No-State Solution': Decolonizing Palestine Beyond the West Bank and East-Jerusalem." The Funambulist no. 10, "Architecture & Colonialism." March-April 2017. 46-51.