You can find my scholarship below, from newest to oldest. I include abstracts, journal links, or PDFs where possible. I also have essays on protest and pop culture in more public venues, including Hard Crackers and ROAR. Feel free to email me for help with accessing any of my writing.
- Insurrection in Black: Rebellious Speculation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Book in progress
- “Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response”
Critics have often paired the Black activist Sutton E. Griggs with the arch-racist Thomas R. Dixon. Both men were Southern Baptist preachers turned novelists, and both wrote Reconstruction romances. But I take the pairing further to pose something counter-intuitive. The standard reading holds that Griggs explicitly rebuts Dixon’s more popular fiction, but in this essay I argue that we can also interpret Dixon’s debut novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902) as a reply to Griggs’s debut novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899), even though Dixon surely never read Griggs. What results from my reading is a better understanding of these authors and texts, the mystifying racial politics of the period, and the discursive power of romance: it provided a literary mode for Black writers and white revanchists alike to contest Reconstruction. In American Literary Realism, Vol 55.3, (2023), 198-206.
- “Canon Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the General Strike in Black Literary History”
Whom do we imagine as part of the general strike, and who imagined it? This essay rethinks W. E. B. Du Bois’s limited vision of the general strike of the enslaved, which he implicitly depicts in Black Reconstruction as a men’s story, by excavating the strike’s Black literary history in the long nineteenth century. Doing so reveals the importance of the Black, Mexican, and Native American anarchist Lucy Parsons in theorizing and advocating the general strike decades before Du Bois. By juxtaposing Parsons with Du Bois, who wages and theorizes the general strike becomes much more expansive, and what the strike does becomes much more revolutionary. The implication for literary critics is significant: far from the niche concern of a few radicals, the general strike constitutes a recognizable and determining figure within Black literary history. In J19, Vol. 10.1 (2022), 77-96.
- “Transforming Rebellion into Revolution: Rereading Cedric Robinson and Eugene Genovese”
In recent years, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism has grown in stature from cult favorite to recovered classic, which makes it all the more remarkable that Robinson’s text was so in conversation with the now disfavored white “Marxian” historian Eugene Genovese. By rereading Black Marxism through Genovese’s From Rebellion to Revolution, we can discover not just a shared intellectual project between the two scholars but a wider cultural impulse: Among even earnest defenders of Black radicalism, there’s a tendency to elevate “rebellion” to the status of “revolution.” Yet in this act of discursive repair, we risk understating just how much is required of us in order to make revolution a reality. At Age of Revolutions.
- “Rewriting Rebellion: The Douglass-Truth Debate”
At an antislavery meeting in 1852, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth clashed over the value of revolutionary violence. Their debate would live on for years, particularly in the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. This recurring scene reveals that Black revolutionary violence offered a conceptual frame for advancing various ideas about racial justice as well as for prominent author-activists like Douglass, Truth, and Stowe to assert leadership claims within liberation movements spanning the antebellum and postbellum periods. My argument explores how both Black and white writers with differing politics and at different historical moments utilized and engaged Black militant discourse—sometimes critically—to define their public identities, advance their racial justice projects, and vie for movement leadership. Thus, this article poses a representative case study in the public lives of these three abolitionist luminaries as well as a novel exploration of Black militancy’s discursive power, an undertheorized subject within nineteenth century American literary studies. In ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol 65.1 (2019), 33-72.
- “Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner”
Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews’s injunction to read “Prophet Nat’s” 1831 insurrection through the US’s encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel’s contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker’s popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic Black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US blackness from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker’s comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory. In Journal of American Studies, Vol 50.4 (2016), 923-51.