At its most expansive, my work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, I conduct historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental degradation, and the politics of gender and sexuality.
My work on gender and sexuality in the Caribbean has been published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the New West Indian Guide, and the volume Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2011). With late historian Manning Marable I am co-editor of Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
In Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic (under contract, Duke University Press), I reframe the concept of body burden to account for the accretion of toxicities in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Focused on material exposures to a pesticide called kepone/chlordécone and on immaterial exposures to racism, sexism, and homophobia, the book asks how contemporary debates about sovereignty on the island are articulated through the prism of ideas about porosity and contamination. In three sections — Sand, Soil, and Sediment — I bring over fifteen years of ethnographic and archival research on the island into conversation with theoretical questions about French coloniality, queer etiologies, anthropocenic pasts, and dystopic futures.
In The Synthetic Atlantic: Chemical Kinship and the Intimacies of Empire (under review, Duke University Press), I take inspiration from Sidney Mintz's classic history of sugar in the Atlantic world — and the rejoinders of his critics — to trace the politics that emerge along one chemical's commodity chain. Following kepone/chlordécone from its post–World War II synthesis in Hopewell, Virginia through its application on banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe to its dispersal across France, Cameroon, Brazil, Poland, and beyond, the book develops the concept of molecular passages to theorize how a single synthetic compound reorganized relations of labor, ecology, governance, and embodiment across the Atlantic world. Because kepone is an endocrine disruptor, a central question for the project is how exposed communities manage anxieties about the relationship of their racialized and gendered bodies to the physical and social environments transformed by this synthetic presence.
A companion digital project, Mapping Toxic Entanglements (MTE), visualizes toxic exposure as a relational and transnational phenomenon— not as a localized hazard, but as the product of interconnected commodity chains, imperial circuits, regulatory asymmetries, and patterns of racial dispossession. The platform is organized by chemical itinerary rather than by location: each node— Hopewell, Martinique, Cameroon, Brazil, metropolitan France, Poland— is connected to the others by the routes through which kepone traveled, including the commodity chain, the regulatory archive, the planter networks that contracted the molecule's synthesis in Brazil after French production ceased, and the migration pathways through which body burdens reached the metropole. MTE integrates GIS-based spatial analysis with archival documentation, scientific literature, and community-generated oral testimony, refusing the hierarchy that treats official data as authoritative and community knowledge as supplementary. Seed funding from Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy supports the prototyping phase, as does support from Columbia’s Data Science Institute.
In Detox: What Remains, I ask what forms of remediation, repair, and collective survival become thinkable when restoration is foreclosed, when the chemicals that most threaten contemporary life are "forever chemicals" that resist every form of biological degradation a human or nonhuman body can mount. Set along the Hudson River corridor between New York City and its upstate communities, the book develops substrate as a concept naming the material infrastructure— soil, fascia, sediment— through which toxicity persists and through which repair, if it comes, must also move.
With Body Burdens and The Synthetic Atlantic, Detox completes a trilogy on toxicity in the Atlantic world.
In Sand (under review, Bloomsbury Object Lessons), I follow a single grain of black volcanic sand from a beach below Saint-Pierre in Martinique across its transformations and back to the shore. The grain becomes béton: the concrete the French state poured into the island after departmentalization; it becomes the glass and silicon of the modern world; it enters the planetary trade in aggregate that strips coasts and dredges islands; and it returns to the shore as sargassum, the algae now suffocating the coastlines from which the sand was taken. The book holds sand and sargassum together as two motions of a single tide— what the sea is made to give up, and what it sends back— and argues that the journey from a grain to the planet is a racialized, two-directional circuit of taking and return.
In a project under development, I take up the intelligence that plants, insects, and microbes generate as they adapt under chemical pressure— knowledge produced at temporal scales no algorithm can apprehend— and read it against digital platforms that embody what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls the extractive view. By contrast, a Black Atlantic genealogy running from Zora Neale Hurston's ground thoughts through Suzanne Césaire's homme-plante names the analytic (vegetality) by which the project perceives another register of knowing: slow, relational, sub-threshold, that the computational apparatus cannot. Related to this work, an arc of essays develops the concept to put pressure on formulations of Black liberation that rely on the cosmopolitan and the mobile.
Alongside these academic lines of inquiry, I am at work on Low Tide: Black Intertidal Ecologies on the Atlantic Seaboard, a narrative book on Black foraging practice across multiple shorelines, tracing what I learn about landscape, inheritance, and sustenance in the intertidal zone.
My most recent publications:
