Recent Research

I am completing a manuscript, currently entitled Whiteness in The Door of No Return, that was solicited by Duke University Press a long, long time ago (alas).  Put in academic jargon, the book, anchored in Dionne Brand’s Map of Door of No Return, engages Afropessimist critique as an inverted categorical imperative and develops the Door of No Return as an aperture onto Whiteness as an ontological structure, with attention to its normative affective, epistemological, and temporal syntaxes.  The aim is to develop a heuristic that might aid in the colossal labor of finding a path through this contemporary wreckage.  Another, somewhat collaborative project focuses on the complex histories, affects, cathexes, and linguistic formations of Hope--particularly how it emerges in the medical practices and care networks around people living with ALS.  (My co-authors are four colleagues from OSU: Philip Armstrong (PhD, Art History), Elyse Everett (MD), David Horn (PhD, Anthropology), and Stephen Kolb (MD).)  Both death and grief also figure largely in the current formation of the Whiteness in the Door of No Return manuscript. Together, the two projects form two sides of White relations to death--the murderous ontology and the exceptional loss of an individual.  

I am also sorting how to write a couple of essays, as the diligent sustained focus that book manuscripts require is not currently within reach.

CV

Books

For further publications focusing on a range of themes and intersections in the fields of queer theory, feminist theory, and twentieth century French philosophy (especially Bataille, Foucault, Irigaray, and Lacan), please see my website on academia.edu.

• Queering Freedom (Indiana UP: 2006)
• Reading Bataille Now, Editor (Indiana UP: 2006)  (2007 Choice Outstanding Title)
• Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race & Ethics (Columbia UP: 2015)