My research spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a focus on the ways in which identity and literary form are shaped by questions of race, particularly Blackness, in the transatlantic imagination. I primarily work on Henry James and Jamesian afterlives in the work of Black writers and intellectuals. Â
I am working on a monograph which argues that Blackness is a crucial ‘hidden subject’ in Henry James’s fiction, requiring sustained attention. To recontextualize his work, I draw on previous scholarship on James and race as well intersectional Black studies, critical race, queer, and feminist theories to highlight a historically contingent relationship between race and sexuality.
My new project examines how Black writer-theorists James Baldwin and Stuart Hall responded to Henry James and the ways in which this relationship informs their exploration of ‘strangeness’ and of being a stranger. This project maintains that Baldwin and Hall robustly interrogate literary criticism’s methods, particularly those developed from Jamesian proto-modernist critiques and theories, and that, by doing so, they transformed literary and cultural studies historically limited by a familiar whiteness and imbricated strangeness within it.
