Works in Progress
I am completing a book manuscript called “Small Places: The Anglophone Caribbean, Victorian Britain, and the Forms of Atlantic Archipelagoes.” Using the framework of the archipelago—understood not merely as a group of islands but rather as a fluid, interdependent geographical unit of land, water, and air—I examine novels, travelogues, and essays by writers ranging from Jamaica Kincaid and George Lamming to George Eliot and John Ruskin. “Small Places” argues that Victorian British and twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers are far more imbricated than the divide between the fields of Victorian studies and Caribbean studies suggests.
My interests in archipelagoes and the aftermaths of imperialism also inform my second book project on Caribbean and Pacific narratives. Provisionally titled “Archipelagic Eyes: Visualizing U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific,” this project studies visual narratives of U.S. occupation in places such as the Philippines and Cuba as well as novels that fictionalize filmmaking. I draw on film studies, Caribbean studies, Asian American studies, and archipelagic studies to argue that grasping the scope of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific requires a scribal-visual-sonic literacy that can transform present-day civic life.
My interests in archipelagoes and the aftermaths of imperialism also inform my second book project on Caribbean and Pacific narratives. Provisionally titled “Archipelagic Eyes: Visualizing U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific,” this project studies visual narratives of U.S. occupation in places such as the Philippines and Cuba as well as novels that fictionalize filmmaking. I draw on film studies, Caribbean studies, Asian American studies, and archipelagic studies to argue that grasping the scope of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific requires a scribal-visual-sonic literacy that can transform present-day civic life.
