Recent Research

I have just completed a manuscript, Whiteness in the Door of No Return, (Duke UP: under review), that is driven by a singular meditation: what would it mean for White people to live the Door of No Return in our senses, our affects, our nerve-endings?  I develop this through a protracted meditation on Dionne Brand's iconic text, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, alongside the affective unmooring of Whiteness in James Baldwin's The Evidence of Things Not Seen.  The book traverses the ethical challenge of White suicide presented by Afropessimism; the power of troping Whiteness, especially the example of 'the shrewd shopper' derived from Stephanie Jones-Roger's They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South; the searing diagnostic of White omnicide as the logic of European colonialism in Amitov Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis; and, through the long moan of Black grieving in Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, the anemic range of White relations to death and grief.  As a whole, the book lays forth central aspects of the stunted affective syntax that perpetuates Whiteness as a structure of violent greed.

CV

Books

For further publications focusing on a range of themes and intersections in the fields of queer theory, race 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)