Contemporary Black Fiction; Black Postmodernism; Gender/Sexuality Studies and African American Narrative; Black Feminist Theory and Criticism; Hip Hop and the Literary; Black Speculative Fiction

My research uses a critical black feminist lens to consider how a variety of African American cultural texts address evolving questions of racial subjectivity, sexual politics, and class in the United States. My first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minnesota, 2007), examined how African American writers articulate the political consequences of intimacy for the already-vulnerable black subject. In 2011, I guest edited a special issue of the journal African American Review on "Hip Hop and the Literary." My most recent book, Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh (Minnesota, 2019), explores the dilemma of black middle-class embodiment in post-Civil Rights era African American fiction. I'm now at work on a new manuscript, extending my interests in embodiment and racialized vulnerability to contemporary Black science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Tentatively entitled “Speculative Pessimisms,” the project places Afrofuturist and Black speculative cultural production in conversation with Afro-Pessimist thought.