I am one of the faculty co-organizers of The Color of New Media, a working group sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender and Berkeley Center for New Media that focuses on intersections of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies. With Prof. Abigail De Kosnik, I have co-edited a collection of essays by the working group entitled #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation(link is external) (Michigan, 2019), and am currently completing a second collection, tentatively titled “The Media Crease, and Other Essays on Repetition and Social Difference.”
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At its core, my research program takes cultural studies approaches to theorize and narrate the interface between race, culture, knowledge, and state power. My work explores race as a “master category” (following Omi and Winant) and as a “medium” (following WJT Mitchell) by crafting comparative, relational, intersectional, and transnational analyses situated in localized and embodied contexts. By turning to the domain of culture, I investigate how power differentials become sedimented and contested in narrative, subject and identity formations, memory, and knowledge production.
My first book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America(link is external) (Minnesota, 2015), explores the changeful complexity of race in its historical particularity, its representational density, and its transnational circulation. It asks, how have Israel and Palestine impacted U.S. racial and imperial formations, how have shifting conceptions of race in the U.S. shaped symbolic and material relationships to Israel and Palestine, and how have different cultural forms been used to surface knowledge in the process? I provide a conjunctural analysis of the post-civil rights United States and Israel’s post-1967 occupation of Palestinian lands. I demonstrate how a range of culture workers linked the U.S. state’s combination of political inclusion and intensified projection of violence at home and abroad to shifting dynamics of rule in Israel and Palestine.
A Shadow over Palestine received the 2017 Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies) from the Association for Asian American Studies; and was a Finalist for the American Studies Association’s 2016 Lora Romero First Book Publication prize.
In my current book-length project, “Patterns of Life: Race, Aesthetics, and the Proximate Archives of U.S. Imperial Culture,” I consider how contemporary cultural practices make sensible the human and other-than-human realities of American warfare. What aesthetic, political, and ethical sensibilities do these practices hone, and to what effect? How might such work shift what Sylvia Wynter calls our “universe of moral obligation?” To answer these questions, I leverage the insights of diasporic aesthetics to consider matters of proximity and relationality—that war might not always be as distant as it seems, nor its histories as distinct.
