Research

At the Society of Fellows, I am working on a manuscript based on my dissertation, Christophe’s Ghost: The Making and Unmaking of Tragedy in Post-Revolutionary Haiti. This monograph explores the phenomenon whereby twentieth-century Caribbean writers turned away from the romantic discourse of political resistance and instead experimented with the literary genre of tragedy to explore the possibilities of revolution and independence. I analyze how writers including Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Derek Walcott constructed a tragic usable past asan alternative history through the controversial figure of the Haitian king Henry Christophe (1767-1820). Drawing upon rarely cited archival material surrounding these works, as well as nineteenth-century historiography, I argue against the prevailing view that these writers condemned Christophe. I posit that these works instead represent Christophe as the Fanonian fire that sought to immolate the entire system. Through the lens of Afropessimism, I connect Christophe’s Fanonian end of the world to questions of freedom and humanity during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

My second book project, Transnational Debates in the Golden Age of Caribbean Theater, 1949-1969, charts a most singular moment in West Indian drama during the period surrounding the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958-1962). In their attempt to create a national, pan-Caribbean theater, West Indian artists debated questions of language, identity, and aesthetics. While many have considered the effort a failure or have overlooked it altogether, the national Caribbean theater movement demonstrated remarkable coordination, skill, and moxie – with original productions performed up and down the Caribbean during a moment of great political and artistic optimism.

Le Pays Retrouvé: A Case for Chamoiseau’s Childhood Memoir as a Creole Usable Past.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Special issue, “Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts." Forthcoming. 

Beyond the Caribbean, my research and teaching interests span literary theory, the childhood memoir, postcolonial theory, the discourse of revolution, metahistory, popular modernisms, the usable past, the French novel, French cinema, and the long Harlem Renaissance, especially in its transnational forms. During my time as a graduate student at Yale, I enjoyed teaching from the art collection as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery. I was trained in site-specific pedagogy and Visual Teaching Strategies, which have had a profound influence on my teaching philosophy.