PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
Publications // Research // Teaching // CV // Contact
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I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science with a focus on Political Theory and Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan (defending Jan 2024). I am also a Lecturer in Political Science at Eastern Michigan University and Assistant Editor at Contemporary Political Theory. I investigate questions about political membership, democracy, and identity by drawing upon Africana political thought. I explore how African and diasporic thinkers have theorized the boundaries and goals of political community, particularly in response to (neo)colonialism, capitalism, and racialization: how should we relate to others across borders or generations? how should we use political power to determine and pursue just outcomes? how does identity emerge from, inspire, or challenge political life? Theorizing from the specificity of their political challenges and traditions, I ask how their insights engage non-Western, canonical, and critical theory to broaden the scope of the history of political thought and develop responses to contemporary challenges.
My research and teaching primarily draw from and engage:
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History of political thought
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Democratic theory
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Time & Temporality
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Africana Political Thought
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Colonialism & postcolonialism
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Marxism & critical theory
Publications
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Scholars have revived the concept of primitive accumulation to describe how explicit violence is an ongoing and structural, rather than simply historical, tool for capitalist domination. However, the relationship between the logic of capitalism and history of capitalism remains obscured. Capitalism is politically enforced and hegemonic, but ongoing instances of capitalist violence repeatedly appear as though they were breaking new ground or finding new frontiers for capitalist growth. In this paper, I offer a novel framework for understanding how primitive accumulation not only creates a capitalist material order but also a temporal order that motivates and reproduces capitalist violence. Focusing on Maasai conflicts over conservation lands in Kenya and Tanzania, I describe how primitive accumulation imposes the historical narratives that naturalize capitalism, ecological rhythms that suppress competing lifeways, and identity categories that marginalize dispossessed populations by characterizing them as primitive. This account advances key debates about settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and potential resistance by clarifying how disproportionate harm against particular populations is justified, how those justifications reproduce and naturalize capitalist domination, and how temporality represents not only a site of domination but also political struggle.
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Julius Nyerere (1922-1999) led Tanzania from independence to 1985 and developed the governing socialist philosophy of Ujamaa. A true public servant and brilliant theorist, Nyerere's life and career were recently thoroughly recounted in the new biography by Issa Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman, & Ng’wanza Kamata. My open-access review narrates the arc of their 1000+ page project and discusses points for further research into Nyerere's thought and political work for theory today.
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In this essay, I examine Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests in order to think through political founding. Viewing founding from the postcolonial context, I explore how members of a political community negotiate among the multiple pasts that continue to affect them, and what kind of institutions and actors are best equipped to pursue this critical part of the founding project. Situating Soyinka’s account against competing narratives of the postcolonial condition, I demonstrate how he uses Yoruba philosophy and cosmology to reframe the challenges and potentials of founding, and I illustrate how political actors should respond to these by adopting the role of “citizen-artists” who can learn from past struggles and overcome their overwhelming legacies. Read as a dramatic intervention into Nigerian democratic politics and as a work of political theory, A Dance offers a lens through which to interrogate founding within and beyond the postcolony.
Ongoing Research
DISSERTATION PROJECT Temporalities of Struggle: Beginning and Belonging in the African Socialist Tradition (defending Jan 2024)​
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How do temporality and emancipatory politics shape one another, and how should they? I argue that these questions have been central to African liberation struggles, and their approaches to the politics of time provoke new approaches to their thought and to broader theoretical debates about democracy, race, and socialism. Dominant interpretations of the mid-20th century fights for formal independence interpret them primarily as fights for self-determination and development that ultimately failed to deliver on those promises. Such interpretations tend to homogenize and dismiss these projects as bygone tragedies motivated by pragmatic, derivative, or context-bound ideas. Such interpretations obscure the ongoing value and diversity of these movements' insights by overlooking the ways that they emphasized competing temporalities to justify policies, articulate demands, and debate with one another. Further, though some political theorists have adopted a renewed focus on time, these studies have not adequately compared how different temporalities interact or offer competing avenues for political struggle, particularly among otherwise similar movements.
I show how African socialist thinkers understood their fights for freedom as fights over time: over interpreting pre-colonial and colonial pasts, asserting agency within chaotic presents, and imagining different emancipated futures. Across five substantive chapters, I follow a narrative arc that begins with the “creation” of capitalist time, contests how “continuity” and “rupture” unfold in colonial domination and anticolonial action, presents the challenge of comparing these through the dramatization of “cyclical time,” and explores how to establish new regimes outside of provincial experience by invoking the “pre-political.” Among my examples, I include subnational resistance struggles by the Maasai in East Africa, dramatic works by Wole Soyinka, and writings and speeches by Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and Obafemi Awolowo. By focusing on how they approach the problem of time, I move away from the current scholarly focus on international relations or explicating indigenous philosophy, and I clarify how African socialist movements draw from and respond to different traditions and scales of political community. In doing so, I present a clearer narrative of how African socialist thinkers interpreted their own challenges and I draw critical theoretical connections across history and geography.
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WORKING PAPER Of, By, and For the Peoples: Anticolonial reverberations of Lincolnian Democracy
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WORKING PAPER Where does the just community begin? Theorizing ideal and non-ideal social contracts in Rawls & Awolowo
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Teaching
I currently teach "Intro to Political Analysis" at EMU and serve as Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for "20th Century Political Theory" at UofM.
Prior experience includes GSI for "Intro to Political Theory" (x2) and "Democracy and Development in Africa" (x3). I summarize select courses that I have developed below:
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Introduction to Political Theory (100 level)
In this class, students explore fundamental questions about how we live in community: what does it mean to be human? to be a part of a group? to be responsible for your own or another's actions? I make the theoretical material familiar by emphasizing contemporary political debates that students are often already asking. Appreciating how some geographical distance can help students approach abstract and sensitive issues with greater clarity, I draw from a global selection of sources that expose them to diverse contexts and traditions of asking and answering these questions.
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Black Political Thought (200 level)
This survey course introduces students to key texts and debates within Africana philosophy and political thought. Central questions that organize the course include (1) the boundaries and definitions of the "African world," (2) the diverse traditions these thinkers draw upon and contest, and (3) the conflicts they have aimed to address, particularly related to race, sex, and class. The geographic and historical range of this course helps us to globally contextualize the work and legacies of thinkers like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter, and Kwame Nkrumah.​
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Colonialism and its Critics (200 level)
An interdisciplinary exploration of the long history of colonialism--geographically focused on Africa and the Caribbean--and the political thought developed to justify and oppose its material and ideological components. Students will read historical monographs alongside and in conversation with theorists like J.S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon.
American Political Theory (300 level)
Political scientists and pundits see the United States today as starkly divided. What is the United States? A paragon of freedom or holdout for slavery, a site of diversity or exclusion, an experience of progress or tradition? In this class, we will explore how the United States embodies both sides at once. To explore this, we will read a wide range of historical texts—some familiar, some less so—that embody the contradictory past and present of US political thought. Students will be asked to read, reflect on, evaluate, and discuss historical and contemporary government documents, speeches, written arguments, essays, and poetry. They will develop their own understanding of urgent political debates in historical context and interrogate their own and others’ perspectives as overlapping, reasonable, and often competing interpretations of what the US is and should be.
Politics and Time (300 level)
How do we experience time, and how does that experience relate to political themes like responsibility, justice, and community? This course brings together a broadly interdisciplinary set of readings from political theory, philosophy, art, and physics to explore the relationship between time and politics, helping students recognize the political character and stakes of one of the features of life that we often take for granted.
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Politics in Chains: Prison Writings (300 level)
In this course, students study the historical and contemporary politics of prisons and abolition, learn about styles of writing in repressive contexts, and read a selection of texts written by prisoners across geography and history engaged in emancipatory struggles. In addition to secondary works on the history and philosophy of punishment, confinement, and abolition, primary authors include Socrates, Gramsci, Angela Davis, Eugene Debs, Mandela, Soyinka, and MLK Jr.
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Theorizing Democracy and Development in Africa (300 level)
This class theorizes how democracy and development have been conceptualized, enacted, and complicated in African political projects. African leaders and thinkers regularly return to these two themes as central problems for politics, and their work challenges preconceived theories from the context of decolonization and nationbuilding. Some themes include single-party democracy, African federalisms, underdevelopment, "uneven" development, and African experiences of capitalism and socialism.
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Philosophies of Black Liberation (400/grad level)
This course closely studies key texts and movements in African and black diasporic political thought. Echoing Fanon's insight that liberation is a comprehensive and cultural practice, the readings and themes of this course incorporate conventionally "political" works by nationalist and independence leaders, philosophical writings, and artistic pieces. Ideologies and movements covered include Third Worldism, Pan-Africanism, African Socialism(s), racial capitalism (ala "Black Marxism"), Negritude, Afropessimism, and Afrofuturism.
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Thinking the Political from Africa (400/grad level)
This class for advanced undergrads and grad students examines African perspectives on political and social theory. This course compiles interdisciplinary sources to interpret African politics in three ways: first, the politics “of” Africa, which will help us understand the political nature and stakes of African history, philosophy, and art; second, politics “in” Africa, which critically engages with more familiar questions about identity, governance, violence, and democracy; and, finally, politicizing “from” Africa, where we examine African approaches that unsettle fundamental categories through which we understand the world, including gender, time, nature, and spirituality.
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