Principal Faculty

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 Algérie: 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.