Research Statement

My early research explored the concept of violence and modernity as a fundamental part of nation and state-building in the postcolony. I was interested in ways the ideas of violence and modernity are intrinsically linked. Drawing from global black literature, drama, and popular culture, I discussed these connections in three ways: (1) I examined epistemic violence as a creation of modernity. (2) I discussed the postcolonial nation-state as a creation of modernity and a site of violence. (3) I explored globalization and neoliberalism as variants of modernity that have continued to shape postcolonial nations. The research led to conference papers, “Border Crossings: Transnational Hip Hop and the Search for Alternative Future,” at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference, University of British Columbia, and “Doing African Cultural Studies: The Idea of Africa and the Legacy of Afrocentrism,” at AfriSem, Northwestern University. These initiatives led me to the ideas of Afro-modernity and Afro-futurism as cultural aesthetics that examine the intersection of the African diasporic literature  and culture with science and technology.

I became interested in the idea of Afro-modernity as an approach that offers new ways of producing knowledge on and about Africa and its diasporas. Taking a cue from Michael Hanchard’s description of Afro-modernity as the integration of contemporary Western institutions, discourses, and technology into the political and cultural practices of peoples of African descent to produce a version of modernity that is largely independent and different from that of the West, I examined ways contemporary black artists, writers, directors, and scholars were re-reading canonical texts and producing new works that challenged narrative orthodoxies and Eurocentric conventions of producing knowledge on Africa. A vital strand of this research was adopting a sonic reading—a reading of literary works that goes beyond their linguistic textuality to explore themes such as transgression, gender, and sexuality. This interdisciplinary project explored the intersection of sound and African literary productions, which allowed me to introduce an alternative reading of texts that will ordinarily be construed as didactic and formulaic to highlight how African writers were adopting new ways of articulating contentious issues, such as sexuality and climate change. The research led to several invited class lectures, presentations at the annual African Literature Association and African Studies Association gatherings, and a peer-reviewed publication, “Soundscape and Narrative Dynamic in Chinelo Okparanta’s, Under the Udala Trees.” I have sustained this strand of research through collaborations with other scholars in sound studies, culminating in a contribution to a g special issue on African Sound Studies by the Journal of African Cultural Studies. My co-authored article with Professor Reginold Royston examines the relationship between printed and spoken texts and what “close listening” methods are appropriate to the reception of auditory literature. We analyze pieces of African and Black diasporic literature in which the aesthetics of orature are deeply embedded in emerging digital forms. In 2022, I delivered a keynote address at Oakton College in Chicago on incorporating West African perspectives in literature. My presentation, “Creative Innovations in West African Literature: Accentuating Sound in Chinua Achebe’s Poetics,” sought to establish a practice of sonic reading and close listening to advance an understanding of the capacities of West African literary texts to transcend textuality—narrowly defined as the printed word—to embrace the sonic as a form of meaning-making. In the future, I intend to expand this research into a monograph or a series of peer-reviewed journal articles on sonic reading as epistemology in African literary studies.

My current research project, Space Traitors: Revolutions, Power, and  Drama, in Africa and the Caribbean, is a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of drama that engages the afterlives of revolutions in Africa and the Caribbean through the indices of violence, power, and subjectivity. The research examines works by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Ebrahim Hussein, Kenneth Watane, Edouard Glissant, Dereck Walcott, and Aimé Césaire to demonstrate how drama engenders what Foucault calls heterotopias by portraying unfinished revolutions and opening up alternative sites of social and political existence that signify possible transformations, which may be conceived as fulfilling the revolution’s promise. Taking a cue from, but also expanding Foucault, the project studies heterotopias as “counter sites” in which the political, economic, and cultural sites in the postcolony are contemporaneously represented, challenged, and flipped. I consider drama as an instance of heterotopia in light of its ability to juxtapose disparate spatial configurations in a single space even (and indeed especially) when these elements are incompatible with each other to demonstrate that (1) historical drama grapples with the representation of revolutionary events to articulate the present and (2) a meaningful interrogation of the postcolony—a site littered with ruins, artifacts, material objects, and absences that bear witness to incomplete revolutions and emancipatory projects—must begin with questioning the assumptions the dramatists made about the present. I use the body as an analytical category due to its centrality in revolutions as a fundamental political resource for wielding power and imposing authority and as a primary site for understanding violence, trauma, and memory. 

The study contributes to the debates on the production of history in the postcolony by demonstrating how anti-colonial revolutions and emancipatory projects have become the conjectures around which the postcolony debates, contests, and fights over its pasts and possible futures. Weaving together literary and theatrical analysis, history, postcolonial, and post-structural theories, I show how dramatists invent and stage indestructible bodies to redefine conventions and paradigms of producing historical knowledge and formulate new questions about the present. One of the project’s chapters, “The Poetics of Unbreakable Bodies in Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile,” won the 2022 A.C. Jordan Prize for the best research paper on Africa. 

My next major project studies medicine and race in postcolonial literature. The project examines ontological politics to show how bodies are enacted in surgical practices in United Kenya Hospital, a fictional hospital that is a primary setting in Yusuf K. Dawood’s fiction and literary ethnographies. The hospital is a sizeable multiracial facility in Nairobi, the first one of its kind in Kenya, established in 1958 to cater to all races in Kenya, unlike segregated hospitals that strictly catered for either Europeans or Africans. The project is grounded in Yusuf Dawood’s fiction (No Strings Attached, 1978; One Life Too Many, 1987; Eye of the Storm, 2010) and a series of stories that first appeared in the Sunday Nation in 1980 under the title “Surgeon’s Diary” and ran for four decades. The stories were later published as Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1985), Off My Chest (1988), Behind the Mask (1987), and The Last Word (2012). I investigate how enactments of the body in this specific hospital make it possible to examine the politics of multiracialism and multiculturalism in East Africa. I am interested in what these enactments occurring at a precise moment—when the search for multiracial societies in colonies with settlers became salient— can teach us about the politics of multiculturalism after the Second World War when Africans intensified the clamor for independence. I presented preliminary research, “Medicine for a Multiracial Nation,” at the African Literature Association in May this year, and I have a forthcoming presentation on the topic at the African Studies Association in November 2022. 

Other future projects include research on how cultures with histories of violence and trauma utilize visual culture and performance as sites or catalysts for memory, mourning, forgiveness, and peace. In 2019, I presented two papers, “The Politics of Visualizing Everyday Life in Darfur,” at the African Literature Association conference and “Arts for Social Change,” at the Sustainable Peace Conference at the University of Notre Dame. In 2021, I presented another paper, “Frontline Literati,” at the African Literature Association, and I am currently working on an article on photography and the politics of representing the suffering of the Other in Kenya and South Africa. This strand of research will lead to a series of journal articles or a monograph on the cultural history of peace in Africa.

My studies, research, and teaching have been funded by different organizations, including Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Scholarship, the African Studies Program, the Ebrahim Hussein Endowment for research in African expressive cultures, the Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS), the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, and the Department of African Cultural Studies, University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.