Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press, 2021)
A view of transatlantic slavery’s afterlife and modern Blackness through the lens of age
Black Age posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Black Age examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been re-imagined through the embodiment of age. The book argues that Black age—through nearly four centuries of subjugation— has become contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, rather than the number of years lived or a developmental life stage, Black age came to signify exchange value, historical under-development, timelessness, and other fantasies borne out of Black exclusion from the human. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of Black exclusion from Western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative Black life, arguing that, if some of us are brave, it is because we dare to live lives considered incomprehensible within a schema of “human time.”
Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
Troubling the Family argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism—the seemingly instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods—this book examines how the shifting status of racial hero for black and multiracial communities makes sense only by means of an account of masculinity. Troubling the Family concludes with a consideration of Barack Obama as a representation of the assurance that multiracialism extended into the 2000s: a version of personhood with no memory of its own gendered history.
South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue:“Black Temporality in Times of Crisis,” edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim (121:1 | January 2022)
This special issue focuses on “crisis” as a critical term in our considerations of Black culture, feeling, being, and life in order to pinpoint temporalities of transformation and times of action. How might various aspects of temporality contribute to what is knowable about Black life and moments of crisis? How does focusing on crisis reveal the constructedness of what is frequently taken to be natural and inevitable? How does crisis draw us toward the precarities, but also the possibilities, of Black life?