•  775
    This paper explores Saidiya Hartman's undertheorized account of 'redress' in conversation with the extensive uptake of her work on Black fungibility, subjection, and critiques of emancipation. Although Hartman uses the term in nearly all of her writing, little work has been done to clarify how Hartman conceptualizes redress as a response to the constitution of Black lives as abstract, exchangeable, and disposable. This paper offers an account of how Hartman theorizes redress, showing how it both…Read more
  •  58
    Fanon's Body: Judith Butler's Reading of the “Historico-Racial Schema”
    Critical Philosophy of Race 8 (1-2): 265-291. 2020.
    This article approaches Judith Butler as herself a theorist of race and racism by exploring her unacknowledged and often problematic reading of Frantz Fanon and his concept of the historico-racial schema. It first traces Butler's uses of Fanon's thinking across her work, outlining the different ways that she draws on Fanon in theorizing race and racism. The article then shows how that theorizing stems from Butler's reading of the historico-racial schema, focusing on her insertion of words that d…Read more
  •  34
    This paper describes the stakes of ongoing conversations in areas of queer theory and black studies on the epistemological, ethical, and political role of unintelligibility. In line with longstanding philosophical questions about the value of aporia as gap or absence in our understanding, thinkers like Lee Edelman and Frank Wilderson III have articulated how black and queer people have regularly fallen into spaces of unintelligibility as they have run against given formations of the social world…Read more
  •  29
    In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 8 (2): 99-103. 2018.
  •  24
    This paper explores the selective uptake of Martin Heidegger’s work in critical philosophy of race and in black studies. While scholars have drawn from Heidegger’s thinking on technology to offer accounts of the technological production of race in general and of blackness in particular, few have engaged with Heidegger’s response to technology: his discussions of Gelassenheit or “releasement.” This paper analyzes this avoidance of Gelassenheit, arguing that its interpretation as passivity points …Read more
  •  18
    While race and racism have never stopped being urgent issues for many communities of color, talk about race, racism, and racial justice have once again become a central part of mainstream social and political discourse in America. But while critical phenomenologists have offered many accounts of what it is like to live in a world shaped by racism—particularly in terms of embodiment—they have not drawn attention to questions about what it is like to live in a world increasingly shaped by anti-rac…Read more
  •  9
    In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (review)
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 8 (2): 99-103. 2016.
  •  3
    This reading of Chiara Bottici's Anarchafeminism asks whether, as an extension of Bottici's project, we need an anarchafeminist account of agon. It explores whether her monist ontology – despite its roots in Spinoza’s Ethics – underemphasizes the question of the need for an anarchafeminist ethics that would help us to explain, interpret, and mediate conflict. Despite the claim that we cannot assume a pre-existent blueprint for anarchafeminist struggle, this piece wonders if Bottici’s commitments…Read more
  • The Psychic Life of Horror: Abjection and Racialization in Butler's Thought (edited book)
    Amsterdam University Press. 2021.
    This essay explores the relationships between subjection, abjection, and race in Judith Butler's work. That the practices and processes of subjection are central in Butler's thinking is hardly in question. From her early work on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Subjects of Desire (1987) through her thinking in Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999), Bodies That Matter ([1993] 2011), The Psychic Life of Power (1997), and Undoing Gender (2004d), Butler has explored the performative and psychic production …Read more