Publications
Areas: 20th-century African American literature, race + space, performance studies, cultural studies, digital humanities
Monograph
Kitchenette Building: Representing Race, Home Space, and Housing in Great Migration Chicago
in progress
My first book project (tentatively titled) is the first cultural history of kitchenette apartments in mid-twentieth-century black Chicago. It is an investigation of race, space, and the built environment through textual analysis, interdisciplinary archival methods, and performance and design theories. I bring together a diverse and rich archive of texts, including novels, photographs, court cases, city policy, poems, newspaper clippings, and autobiography to define the housing landscape of mid-20th century Chicago and to locate the kitchenette within it. Kitchenette Building seeks to reestablish the centrality of kitchenettes to understandings of black life in Chicago of the 1940s and ’50s.
Journal Articles
Black Spatial Affordances and the Residential Ecologies of the Great Migration
Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 2022
Global Black Ecologies special issue
This review-style article reviews literature in geography, phenomenology, design studies, performance studies, and ecology to posit a theory of “black spatial affordance.” It extends a design studies theory (affordance) through a racial analytic to interrogate Chicago’s kitchenette dwellings and the black domesticities that emerged from them.
Quotidian Expenses: Residential Repertoires and Domestic Pedagogies in Great Migration Chicago’s Kitchenettes
American Quarterly, 2022
This article analyzes Chicago’s primary Great Migration-era housing form—the kitchenette apartment building—as a site produced and maintained by racial capitalism and resulting in labored domestic performance practice for its disproportionately black inhabitants.
Black Hair Haptics: Touch and Transgressing the Black Female Body
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2018
doi:10.1215/15366936-6955098
This essay aims to offer a critical examination of natural black hair as a central site of interpersonal negotiation for black women in the United States. Drawing on performance studies, cultural studies, and black feminist studies, I offer black hair haptics as an analytic for the racialized and gendered dimensions of quotidian public interpersonal engagement with black hair as an extension of the black body.
Book Chapter
Kitchenette Counterpoints: Chicago’s Blight Discourse and the Modern South Side
in progress
This essay analyzes the relationship between the Illinois Institute of Technology and Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood during the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on how IIT benefited from the discourse of blight to expand its institutional footprint through acquisition, landlordship, and demolition of neighboring housing, which included kitchenette buildings.
Book Reviews
Review of The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison
The Common Reader, 2021
Review of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry; and: Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart by Tracy Heather Strain
African American Review, 2020
doi:10.1353/afa.2020.0038
Review of Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu
Verse literary magazine, 2010