The Short Version: I work on race, aesthetic experience, selfhood, sociality, the relationship between all four, and whether and how philosophy can talk about them and their nexus points. This manifests in deep and abiding interests in film, horror, comics, music, blackface, transness, Adrian Piper, Fred Moten, Martin Heidegger, mysticism, materialism, and more.

The Slightly Longer Version: My research is animated by a deceptively simple question: what are the philosophical, existential, and social conditions of possibility of a genuinely black, genuinely radical politics? This question may seem niche; parochial even. But as Nahum Chandler argues (in the fantastic X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought) seemingly parochial questions about blackness can serve as gateways to vast nexuses of complex and far-seeking philosophical inquiries.

In my work, this initiating question leads to the further question: what ontological theory of a) the self and b) social relation does a black radical politics require? What new form of human life does it push us towards? In my work, I interrogate and try to imagine otherwise possibilities to standard philosophical models of selfhood and relationality, in particular ones that center aesthetics as a core constituent of human life. I seek particular alternatives in the work of Adrian Piper, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Recently, I have become particularly interested in the relationship between these possibilities and those that emerge in other non-white forms of life, and in the relationship between questions of blackness’s ontology and social metaphysics and that of race more generally. I have also become interested in the role both perception and affect play in the construction of these forms of social relation and self-relation.

In order interrogate and imagine these otherwise possibilities, I turn to aesthetic experience. This experience, I hypothesize, is a focal point of both black radical politics and antiblack racialization. My organizing question here is: what possibilities of relation to–what aesthetic experiences of–art and aesthetic objects exist, and what are art and aesthetic objects such that these possibilities can exist? What role do these possibilities play in racist racialization and in radical racial olitics? Here, too, I am convinced that philosophy has much to learn from black studies and other marginal traditions. Horror, film, comic books, video games, and music all serve as sites of inquiry, as do deeper and broader investigations into aesthetic experience, aesthetic love, and the ontology of art. 

Throughout all these investigations, I remain fixated on the metaphilosophical question. Is philosophy equipped for the above investigations? Indeed, can they even be captured in speech? What are we doing when we try to talk about them? How can we talk about them in productive ways? In these questions, I am guided by post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language (particularly that of Stanley Cavell) and phenomenological accounts of philosophical methodology.