Racial Indigestion.
New York University Press 2012

Racial Indigestion won the 2013 Lora Romero Award for best first book in American Studies awarded by the American Studies Association and the 2013 award for best book in Food Studies awarded by the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

In 1900, the Thomas Edison Company produced a film called “The Gator and the Pickaninny.” This silent gag film depicts a small black child fishing on a tropical shore. An alligator crawls up behind him and eats him up; soon after, the child’s father runs up, cuts open the alligator and pulls the child out whole and happy. How does a film of a black child being eaten become legible to audiences in the early twentieth century? As my research shows, this troubling image emerges from a Southern folk story that alligators prefer to eat black children rather than white children, ostensibly because their flesh is sweeter. More than an insight into the racial politics of film in the period, this idea of edible blackness reveals something about consumption and white identity. Indeed, as I demonstrate, this image appears consistently in U.S. popular culture, finding its first expression in the antebellum novel and continuing in the material culture of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Through readings of material culture, novels, cookbooks and visual culture, my book project, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century examines how food culture – its social practice and cultural representations - informs the production of racial difference and other forms of political inequality. However this is not entirely a project about food. Rather, my book aims to contribute to the growing field of food studies by examining eating; I seek to understand the ways that eating produces political subjects by naturalizing the social and biological discourses that create bodies. In four separate case studies, I examine images of mouths and bodies, of eaters and the eaten, to produce a story about racial formation in the nineteenth century that reveals the intimate workings of the body politic.

Download the Introduction and the Table of Contents.

Reviewed Here:

American Quarterly, GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly; Journal of American Studies; The Black Scholar; legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; TDR: The Drama Review; WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly; The Journal of American Culture; Children’s Literature Association Quarterly; Food and Foodways; Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture; American Literature; Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies; Radical Teacher; Food, Culture and Society; Canadian Review of American Studies; American Literary History; Early American Literature; others.

Keywords For Gender and Sexuality Studies
New York University Press, 2021

Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies was named a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association

Managing Editor, Kyla Wazana Tompkins. Keywords Collective: Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Karma Chavez, Mishuana Goeman, Amber Musser, Kyla Wazana Tompkins. Research and Editorial Assistant, Anisha Ahuja.

Read the Introduction and Sample Essays here.

Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies introduces readers to a set of terms that will aid them in understanding the central methodological and political stakes currently energizing feminist and queer studies. The volume deepens the analyses of this field by highlighting justice-oriented intersectional movements and foregrounding Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; transnational feminisms; queer of color critique; trans, disability, and fat studies; feminist science studies; and critiques of the state, law, and prisons that emerge from queer and women of color justice movements.

Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxication, Rot, Jelly (forthcoming)

New York University Press, 2024

Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories— gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication—in order to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. A new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, and an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique, the archive of Deviant Matter includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the legal and public health archives of the U.S. Supreme Court Slaughterhouse decision of 1873; the U.S. Food and Drug Act of 1906; nineteenth-century literature by Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer Afro-Canadian, Asian-American, Arab-American and African-American and British video, installation and performance art.

Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, Deviant Matter serves as a figure for thinking about how matter, art, politics and affect work across multiple scales ranging from the intimate and everyday to the inner working of the state. For instance, on an intimate level the materials in Deviant Matter move their consumers: they affect them, producing feelings and sensations that are then linked to a system of social value: these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. The sense of movement, of liveness, on the part of the material affects and sensations I study – yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol have a mysterious alchemy, and animal products actively mold and rot – is another expression of movement: these are lively substances that at times seem to, or even do, have a will of their own. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, they energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy both capitalism and the state seek to manage, secure and extract.