essays &
reviews

“Present but Not Accounted For: Astrid Roemer’s On a Woman’s Madness,” Words without Borders, March 4, 2023.

“Labor, Luster, and Lineage: ‘Hear Me Now’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art in America, November 29, 2022.

Review of Maria Firmina dos Reis, Ursula, translated by Cristina Pinto-Bailey, Asymptote, July 28, 2022.

“Reparative Semantics: On Slavery and the Language of History,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, January 4, 2022.

“Shadow Acts: On Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life and Stephen Best’s None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 29, 2020.

“Zora Neale Hurston in the Making,” Public Books, June 12, 2018.

“Sandoval Redux,” ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 30-32, 2018.

“On Élie and Eric,” Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, no. 117, p. 13, 2015.

“Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History,” Transition: An International Review, no. 112, pp. 117-130, 2013..

articles & Chapters

“Don’t Call It a Comeback,” introduction to “Gayl Jones, Now and Then,” a special cluster in Post45: Contemporaries. [cfp TK]

“Radio, Dynamo, Loom, Gun: Du Bois’s Theatrical Plantation Machine,” Looking Forward into the Past: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revolutionary Uses of History, edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere and Stephen G. Hall. [solicited]

“Early Black Writers,” Routledge Companion to 18th-Century Anglophone Literature, edited by Suvir Kaul, Sarah Eron, and Nicole Aljoe, Routledge. [solicited]

“Necessity is the Mother of Translation,” Theories and Methodologies section, PMLA, Special Topic: “Translation,” vol. 138, no. 3, 2023, pp. TK. [solicited]

“Lateral Reading Lyric Testimony; or, the Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in the Americas,” American Quarterly, Special Issue: “The Politics of Language, Multilingualism, and Translation in American Studies,” edited by Vicente L. Rafael and Mary Louise Pratt, vol. 73, no. 3, 2021, pp. 639-670.

“Richard Wright’s Globalism,” The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright, edited by Glenda Carpio, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 164-184.

“Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in The Marrow of Tradition,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-28.

“Native Sons; or, How ‘Bigger’ Was Born Again,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 164-192.

“The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery,” Journal of Social History: Societies & Cultures, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-50.

“‘I Talk More of the French’: Creole Folklore and the Federal Writers’ Project,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 439-456.