writing

My writing takes place primarily within academic contexts in the form of journal articles, book and art reviews, and my current book project. These lines of inquiry focus primarily on the politics of gender, sexuality, migration, and race in and through the body and aesthetics/cultural production.

book // staging statelessness: Queer African refugees and the limits of belonging

Staging Statelessness: Queer African Refugees and the Limits of Belonging for quotidian and aesthetic performances as strategic practices of unbelonging that simultaneously index and intervene upon transnational legal systems, geopolitical histories of migration and sexuality, and popular media representations that position Queer African refugees as always already out-of-place. This book builds on over seven years of collaboration with LGBTIQ people from across the African continent who are seeking asylum in South Africa because of gender and sexual orientation-based violence. I use performance to pay attention to how transnational legal systems (esp. asylum law), international and local human rights discourse and activism, and various media stage the production and reception of LGBTQ asylum seekers. By shifting the dominant focus of refugee studies from the "global south" to the "Global north" to one situated within the African continent, I argue that we can begin to open up new paradigms of citizenship and belonging beyond Westernized notions of nation-states, the neoliberal individual, and the deserving, dependent migrant.

ARTICLES

“Relational Generativity in South African Queer Nightlife.” Queer Nightlife. Eds. Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2021.

“Lawful Performance and Representational Politics of Queer African Refugees in Documentary Film.” Journal of African Cultural Studies. 33.1 (2021): 67-83.

“Fantasy Subjects: Dissonant Performances of Belonging in Queer African Refugee Resettlement.” Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. Eds. Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chavez. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

“A circle made by walking.” The Brooklyn Rail. March 2020. https://brooklynrail.org/2020/03/criticspage/A-circle-made-by-walking.

“Gay Liberation Front,” “FTM International,” and “No Past, No Present, No Future (1973, Yulisa Amadu Maddy)” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Ed. by Howard Chiang. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019.

Prominently Performing blackness in the "rainbow nation": Athi-Patra Ruga's the future White women of Azania, Women and performance: a journal of feminist theory 27.1 (2017): 67-80.