Project title: "Imagination, Embodiment, and the Everyday: Blackness and the (An)archives of Empire"
Project description: "While my research changes a little every day, currently I would explain it in the following way. In the realm of the everyday, how does the radically unthinkable become thinkable? To answer this question, I plan to conduct a comparative, historically informed literary analysis of critical fabulation. Coined by Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation is a storytelling method employing ethnographical archival research, critical theory, and historical imagination to understand what is possible based on what has existed in the past. In conversation with many scholars of the archive, I define archives, here, as unstable discourses between the possibilities of pasts, presents, and futures that circulate among materials. In this project, my interlocutors are authors who write histories of the present informed by their embodied understandings of (anti-)Blackness and by the anarchives they identify within archival (im)materials. Anarchives are that which exist within the margins of and beyond the logics of nation-states. Equally vital interlocutors are the texts themselves. My project is guided by a few key questions considering, for instance, the specific spatial and temporal ethics of critical fabulations. Throughout, I listen for what we as readers can learn from critical fabulation that may guide us as we operate in our everyday lives and seek pasts, presents, and futures at the edges of and beyond our relationships with the (il)logics of empire."
Most important achievements: I do not believe that anything I have done or will ever do is distinguishably or particularly important. What I accomplish is not particularly important to me. Rather, it is who and what guides me that I care most about.
Reflections on the College Scholar Program: Interdisciplinary research makes it invaluable.