Scholarship

My scholarly book project, “A Peculiar Paradise,” advances the term “peculiar” as a principle under which to gather select African American and Native American literary works. I derive “peculiar” from cultural theorist Hortense Spillers’ appraisal of Black women’s “peculiar American encounter.” As an interlocutor in scholarly conversations surrounding the history of sexuality, I utilize this term in order to articulate the “strange affinities” forged between Black Americans and Native nations. Though differently racialized, African American and Native American peoples were and remain disadvantageously situated both in respect to the norms of settler sexuality and its attendant rights of social and geographic mobility. To circumvent, challenge, and strategically negotiate these norms, Black and Native writers have penned narratives that directly address the subject of itinerancy, a form of travel undertaken by individuals for reasons other than labor. My book project offers a literary history of walking as it was practiced, policed and politicized during the 19th and early 20th centuries, during which time the federal government corralled and controlled Black and Native populations through forced marches, Indian Removal and "sojourner laws. The works of literature and autobiography that I address in my book depict characters and historical persons as they travel away from these restrictive geographies and toward a de-territorialized “paradise” in the peculiar company of women.

My first article, “The Mathematics of Truth: Peripatetic Freedom Calculations in Narrative of Sojourner Truth,” was published in Nineteenth-Century Literature. A discussion of the article manuscript was held at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies in September 2022. I have also written reviews for Women's Review of Books.