I am a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame. While my work is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of violence in twentieth century Black literature, I currently work on aesthetics of violence and textiles in literature during earlier centuries.
How do textiles condition Black existence? My work attempts to answer this question through studying eighteenth and nineteenth century textiles in relation to fugitive Black being. The corporeal Black bodies, as transitory entities of this time, create a sort of Black spirit and resulting cultural cosmopolitan due to the commodity exchanging of textiles. In other words, by examining this speculative vision of Black bodies during these centuries, we better understand the networks of commerce and Blackness and the ways that Blackness comes to exist through textiles. My work on textiles and Blackness in America, England, and Côte d'Ivoire aims to show how Black bodies not only created this global economy of America through cotton but created the very aesthetic logic of the textile market throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth-century worldview. I examine literature to study the ephemeral textiles of the time because this is where we learn of the importance of textiles and what it means to drape one’s body.