BA (U Washington), MA (U Chicago), MA, PhD (U Virginia)
Assistant Professor
Specialization:
American and African American literature and culture, crime fiction, critical theory, popular culture, and cultural studies.
Select Publications:
In my research, I uncover a hidden genealogy of twentieth-century African American literature centered on the urban crime and detective fiction form. Drawing from a diverse archive of self-published and locally-distributed pulp paperbacks, experimental prison novels, autobiographies, and political essays, as well as interviews I personally conducted with significant pulp publishers, writers, and family members, I argue that the crime fiction of Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Nathan Heard, Clarence Cooper, and Roland Jefferson provides a privileged window into the social, spatial, and racial cleavages that emerge at the pivotal moment of America's postwar "urban crisis." A literary and cultural history firmly situated in the field of American studies, Servants of Darkness draws upon recent critical theories of race and gender, urban studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and especially cultural Marxism to argue that the popular literature of hustlers, junkies, pimps, sex-workers, prison inmates, and ghetto revolutionaries is not mere genre fiction, but, unexpectedly, an aesthetically innovative and politically viable expression of black working-class identity. I break from previous scholars of African American literature and culture, who have dismissed black crime fiction as a "low" literary form, as well as recent cultural and literary critics who have exhaustively documented the relationship between hard-boiled heroes and the white industrial working class. I make the case that the crime fiction industry and detective fiction form have provided African American writers with enabling yet troublesome locations to express the political and artistic concerns of black working-class men contending with a racialized service economy, the modern prison-industrial complex, suburbanization, and the postwar containment of urban minorities.