Book Project

My book project, American Imperception: Literary Form, Sensory Perception, and Political Economy in Early American Literature, explores how sensory perception has been historically determined by economics. Within the specific context of racial capitalism as developed throughout the U.S. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my project investigates the centrality of the political economy of slavery to the development of the modern sensorium. I argue that early American and African American writers used literature to teach their readers to understand how economic forms and forms of economic activity fundamentally shape, train, and direct how we sense and how we think. This dynamic between economics and sensory perception—and the way in which it is rendered through literature—is what I term in my project “imperception.” Imperception describes the interplay between the sensible and the perceived; how the thinkable aligns with the phenomenal world; and how these writers sought to render through literary form that which is beyond the sensible and the thinkable alike. My project considers how the senses are trained to perceive in contextually and historically specific ways: how, through the use of narrative form, metaphor, characterization, and other literary techniques, early American writers sought to supplement our sensory incapacities with literary interventions that would both allow us to read what we cannot sense and also teach us how and why the world appears to us as it does.

Published Work

“Imperception.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, vol. 7, 2024. LINK.

This essay develops the political concept of “imperception” within the context of racial capitalism and early African American literature. By focusing on texts by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Martin Delany, and William Wells Brown, this essay argues that the development of the modern sensorium is fundamentally tied to the political economy of slavery. Imperception describes the ways in which these writers make legible the historical determination of sensory perception by slavery. By focusing on this range of anti-representational texts, this essay argues that the political and social imaginary reaches its end at the limits of perception.

“The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 56, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-20. Winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature for 2023. LINK.

This essay investigates a central problem for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: why literature won’t directly represent Black revolution. I argue that in Blake; or, the Huts of America, Martin Delany thinks through the structural impossibility of conceptualizing a specifically Black sociality by continually refusing to depict Black revolution at the level of the plot. Instead, Blake ties together Black labor with revolution to suggest that within the context of the system of capital in the nineteenth century, Black labor’s central role in the world economy renders the social nature of Black revolution similarly imperceptible. Blake reproduces this imperceptibility and this unthinkability through its structure. The book, which is famously incomplete, ends just as a violent revolution is about to erupt in Cuba. Whether the final chapters were lost or never written in the first place, I track how this same anti-climactic and non-representational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. I suggest that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby representing a specifically Black sociality. I explore how Delany adopts the literary technique of withholding from the slave narrative to actively play with the formal and generic bounds of the novel and the slave narrative alike. By adopting this familiar technique, Delany asks what role the novel has within the African American literary tradition and what role fiction can play in interrogating the limits of a mode of political thought hemmed in by a racialized political economy.

“Martin Delany: Labor, Ecology, and Black Freedom.” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, special issue on “African American Nature Writing,” vol. 30, 2022, pp. 59-75.

“Apathy, Political Emotion, and the Politics of Space in Thoreau’s Antislavery Writing.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 64, no. 2, 2022, pp. 139-160. LINK.

This essay takes Thoreau’s frustrations with the impossibility of perceiving the injustice of slavery as an invitation to discern within his larger corpus a distinct body of work that we can call Thoreau’s antislavery writing. Beyond the mere topic of antislavery, I argue in this essay that Thoreau’s antislavery writing is defined by a spatial politics that intersects with the politics of emotion: I argue that Thoreau is deeply invested in how the issue of slavery is consistently displaced both spatially and emotionally. Through careful close readings of a number of shorter entries from Thoreau’s Journal and his major antislavery essays—including “Resistance to Civil Government,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” and “The Last Days of John Brown”—I show how Thoreau returns throughout his career to a recurring set of images and rhetorical tropes to help conceptualize the immediate importance of abolition, even to those who think themselves too far removed from slavery to do anything about it, or to care. In his writing, Thoreau wants to know why slavery and the abolitionist cause engender such an apathetic response, and why, similarly, slavery appears to be such a distant issue. As I will show, the emotional and spatial distance from the issue of slavery that Thoreau notes in his neighbors results from how economics compartmentalizes the political sphere. Political economy and the language of economics make the most pressing political issues always seem both remote and insignificant. Thoreau is interested in how political conviction and action can become disjointed: just because you know something is wrong does not mean you are going to do anything about it. This essay, then, starts from a place of frustration. It tracks Thoreau’s frustrations, and it pairs those frustrations with a shared set of politically-coded images and rhetorical tropes to consider Thoreau not just as an antislavery speaker and figure, but as a literary writer whose most complex thinking reveals itself to us when we treat him and his writing as such.

“Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau.” American Literary History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2020, pp. 221-242. LINK

This essay argues that throughout his oeuvre, Henry David Thoreau develops a theory of sensory perception that comes to its literary culmination in Cape Cod (1865). I argue that Thoreau’s thinking on the senses demonstrates that the senses are a product of historical development. In Cape Cod, Thoreau is particularly interested in how economic interest has trained the senses to become structurally incapable of sensing the death that is a necessary part of the commodity form and social life in general—similar to what Karl Marx in Capital (1867) would describe as “dead labor.” This essay explores how in Cape Cod, Thoreau offers his reader a method of reading that seeks to make legible through literary form—specifically through puns, metaphor, and juxtaposition—the point at which the senses fail. Thoreau’s method in Cape Cod therefore differs from his more well-known works such as Walden (1854), where he only explicitly tells his readers about that to which they are blind. Ultimately, I claim that Thoreau’s political message throughout his career remains much the same, but the way in which he mobilizes literary form to convey that message marks an important change in how we might make sense of—and make sensible—political economy.

“The Production of the Subject: Foucault, Marx, and the Ontology of the Market.” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics, vol. 27, 2019, pp. 85-110. LINK

This article offers a new way of constellating Foucault and Marx through their shared economic thinking. Although seemingly opposed in questions regarding the relation of the market to the subject, I argue that Marx’s conception of alienation developed in the 1844 Manuscripts gives an essential production-based grounding to Foucault’s assertion that the market acts as the site of veridiction within liberal and neoliberal capital. Rather than continue to find fault lines between Foucault and Marx, this essay seeks to understand how both thinkers find common ground within the economic determination of human and social possibility.