Current Projects
My first academic monograph explores black refusal and worldmaking in 21st century hexagonal France (2014-2024). It builds on my doctoral thesis, "Breaking the Republic in Half? Black Worldmaking Practices in Contemporary France," which I completed in 2024. In a national context where dominant republican universalism stifles the recognition of the very existence of race and racism, and where hegemonic notions of Frenchness are predicated on the oppression and exclusion of the (post)colonial "Other," this project asks how black postcolonial citizens resist their oppression in the present and sketch out alternative possibilities of being and belonging in France for the future. These research questions are excavated across three main locations of analysis: rap, black women’s self-narratives in film and literature, and afrofeminist organising and theatre performances. I am currently working on a book proposal for this project.
My postdoctoral research project interrogates the role of culture, music and nightlife in migrant worker organising and community-building the 1970s and 1980s. While my main location of analysis is hexagonal France, I'm interested in exploring the networks of international solidarity that emerged at the time, and I hope this project will take me to unexpected places. I want to understand the role cultural objects played in the temporal distortion of the strike , the way people used film, music and photography to constitute themselves as subjects in struggle. I want think about instances of incomplete or failed solidarity, about the many shapes that remaking the world can take.
I'm also part of two collaborative research networks based in CRASSH, at the University of Cambridge, as a convenor of Ambivalent Archives, and a co-director of the Catalysts for Decolonisation research lab. These initiatives hope to challenge silo-ed, exclusionary and isolated forms of academic research, and, beyond their specific focus, are continued attempts at doing the work of academia differently.
Past Projects
Bad Form
From 2020 to 2022, I was the Features editor of Bad Form, a literary magazine for and by writers of colour founded by Amy Mae Baxter. As part of my work for Bad Form, I interviewed countless authors and reviewed many, many books. I edited even more interviews, reviews and essays, and helped put on various events. The magazine no longer exist and its website is no longer online, but you can read some of this work in previous print issues (if you ever come across ones) or read one of my favourite interviews here.