All of my work reflects a commitment to Hegel's central thesis that the essence of humanity is free will, as well my broad agreement with his core arguments concerning the nature of its authentic actualization. However, this commitment arises less from the details of Hegel's texts themselves, than from my research into the actions and victories of the emancipatory cultural movements - be they political, religious, or aesthetic - which have emerged in his wake, from the Civil Rights movement to the Black Panther Party to Hip Hop culture and beyond. The self-understanding of these movements offered by their participants, I also argue, has becom…
All of my work reflects a commitment to Hegel's central thesis that the essence of humanity is free will, as well my broad agreement with his core arguments concerning the nature of its authentic actualization. However, this commitment arises less from the details of Hegel's texts themselves, than from my research into the actions and victories of the emancipatory cultural movements - be they political, religious, or aesthetic - which have emerged in his wake, from the Civil Rights movement to the Black Panther Party to Hip Hop culture and beyond. The self-understanding of these movements offered by their participants, I also argue, has become essentially illegible to the postmodern theories hegemonic in the academic humanities, often leading them to be appropriated in distorted form; this trend, I fear, ultimately tends towards the erasure of these movements and their vital lessons from scholarly discourse and perhaps even cultural impact. Much of my work has thus critically interrogated academic postmodernism in both theory and practice.
My current projects include a Hegelian history of the surprising success and passionately united fanbase of the band Phish, a collection of my essays on the dialectical thought of Huey P. Newton, and various essays on the theoretical underpinnings of animal magnetism, prescient clairvoyance, and modern ceremonial magic.
