The Agenda
My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Black politics and Black political thought from the Colonial Era to today. I blend history and theory to help us better understand the making of law and race, the development of the carceral state, and the politics of love.
My work is both historically grounded and theoretically imaginative. I am interested in how the continuities and disjunctures across long historical periods enable us to better understand the past. From this expansive view of the past, I develop theories that clarify the present and advance the struggle for alternative futures.
Keep scrolling to learn more about my current projects.
Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison
The violence of slavery is remembered for its excesses. My first book, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, reveals a more chilling truth: the violence of slavery was often deliberate, calculated, and lawful.
From the seventeenth-century Barbadian sugar plantation to the South Carolina Penitentiary at the turn of the twentieth, state officials wrote racial violence into law and empowered white men of wide-ranging statuses to police the Black population. In doing so, they navigated grim questions: What kind and degree of racial violence should law codify? Who would enact that violence? According to what logic and whose interests would law legitimate that violence? The perennial question of racial violence sparked debates that only law could mediate and yielded answers that only law could legitimate.
Yet lawmakers and enslavers were only ever half the story. Rebellions by free and enslaved Black people shaped this cruel-but-careful calculus. Their liberatory struggles, though brutally crushed and cut tragically short, forever changed the world around them. Across more than two-hundred years of colonial and state development, moments like the Stono Rebellion and Vesey Rebellion generated ideas of whiteness and Black criminality we have long since inherited. Even more chilling, they shaped the very legal tradition that gave way to the modern prison. This long arc shows how slave rebellions were integral to the making of the American criminal legal system and sheds new light on its racist origins.
Building on the book, my current research focuses on the early development of the carceral state. This article shows how the converging and diverging interests of state officials, prison administrators, and private corporations shaped the state’s first prison as it lurched from the politics of reform to convict leasing to a prison plantation. By viewing the carceral state from the state-level and extending our timeline to the nineteenth century, I argue that APD scholars can engage in deeper pattern recognition, identifying how the afterlife of slavery and a vision for a modern criminal legal system were entangled. The project sharpens our understanding of the relationship between slavery and convict leasing while complicating the bifurcation of Northern (rehabilitative) and Southern (punitive) prisons.
This article is now available in Studies in American Political Development.
The South Carolina Penitentiary and the Roots of the Carceral State
A companion work, “Race and Pardons in a Hybrid Authoritarian Legal Order,” explores white Democrats’ puzzling decisions to pardon Black prisoners after Reconstruction when their unfree labor was integral to the state and economy. I argue that a hybrid authoritarian state was hamstrung by its attempts to adapt racial hierarchy, preserve patriarchy, and modernize racial capitalism, which state actors only temporarily reconciled through pardons. For APD and sociolegal scholars, my work shows how authoritarian states are rarely unitary but more often hybrid patchworks that law holds together.
Race and Pardons in a Hybrid Authoritarian Legal Order
A final companion project will take a bottom-up approach to the usage of pardon petitions by Black citizens and prisoners during the collapse of Reconstruction. I argue Black citizens strategically appealed to elites in a hybrid authoritarian legal order by blending the language of law and rights with paternalist ideas of reform and respectability, ideals of justice and proportionality, patriarchal familial ideals, and economic concerns about dependence. For legal mobilization scholars, my reading of pardon petitions shows how Black citizens strategically mobilized law and legal conventions within that order.
Legal Mobilization Under Hybrid Authoritarian Rule
Contemporaneously, I am interested in repressive lawmaking in response to social movements, particularly the recent surge in anti-protest legislation as a site of carceral state-building. I have begun to assemble a database of anti-protest bills and laws introduced since Black Lives Matter activists have begun their campaigns for prison reform and abolition. Leveraging concepts from my prior work, I examine how punitive lawmaking is structured by longstanding ideas of Black criminality, an ideology of white ignorance, and an economy of racial violence that seeks to reconcile its overlapping and diverging commitments to hierarchy and capital.
Anti-Protest Legislation and Carceral State-Building
Building on my prior scholarship on Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin, a second book will explore the role of love in the political thought of James Baldwin including his essays, fiction, and archives.
While theorists often focus on his critical and normative preoccupation with American democracy, I am drawn to the global dimensions of Baldwin’s biography and political thought. Baldwin, who spent much of his life abroad in France, Switzerland, West Africa, and Turkey, increasingly viewed white supremacy in the U.S. as interconnected with global processes of imperialism and settler colonialism. Likewise, he recognized the ways that the meaning of Blackness—and the violence that attends it—was specific to nations while traversing their borders. Baldwin often diagnoses these processes as a problem of ‘lovelessness’ yet scholarship is typically restricted to the U.S. context. Moreover, Baldwin’s normative project—which I take to be grounded in ‘the key to life,’ love—is an undertaking with global, structural implications that remain underspecified.
In the meantime, I have begun to explore these new ideas in “Love in the Shadow of Racial Capitalism,” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin, wherein I show how routinizing scarcity, deprivation, and violence creates dehumanizing relations that delimit our capacity for—and opportunity to—love. In contrast to love, which forces us to confront ourselves, I argue that racial capitalism teaches us to evade ourselves by confusing material security with self-realization. Against this loveless system of racialized economic domination, I maintain that love is a fraught-but-revolutionary antidote to racial capitalism.
