My BOOKS
Resistance & Decolonization
How can a people overthrow 500 years of colonial oppression? What can be done to decolonize mentalities, economic structures, and political institutions? In this book, which includes the first translation of the text 'Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance' as well as 'The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence,' the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral explores these and other questions. These texts demonstrate his frank and insightful directives to his comrades in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde's party for independence, as well as reflections on culture and combat written the year prior to his assassination by the Portuguese secret police.
As one of the most important and profound African revolutionary leaders in the 20th century, and justly compared in importance to Frantz Fanon, Cabral's thoughts and instructions as articulated here help us to rethink important issues concerning nationalism, culture, vanguardism, revolution, liberation, colonialism, race, and history. The volume also includes two introductory essays: the first introduces Cabral's work within the context of Africana critical theory, and the second situates these texts in their historical-political context and analyzes their relevance for contemporary anti-imperialism.
Epistemic Decolonization
European colonization played a major role in the acquisition, formation, and destruction of different ways of knowing. Recently, many scholars and activists have come to ask: Are there ways in which knowledge might be decolonized? Epistemic Decolonization examines a variety of such projects from a critical and philosophical perspective. The book introduces the unfamiliar reader to the wide variety of approaches to the topic at hand, providing concrete examples along the way. It argues that the predominant contemporary approach to epistemic decolonization leads one into various intractable theoretical and practical problems. The book then closely investigates the political and scientific work of Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, demonstrating how their philosophical commitments can help lead one out of the practical and theoretical issues faced by the current, predominant orientation, and concludes by forging links between their work and that of some contemporary feminist epistemologists.
Canaäd
*2023 Winner of the Historical Fiction Company’s Ancient World Bronze Medal
*Finalist for the American Legacy Book Award in Narrative Poetry (2024)
"Gods against gods, men against men, each kind / against each other: Who is in the right? / Truly, which ones could ever conquer Death?"
So Laeya--the Canaanite goddess Athirat masked in human form--asks after a crucial battle. Situated in the interimperial turmoil of the Late Bronze Age, Canaad (Kay-nay-ahd) follows this heroine's journey as it dovetails with that of Aqhat, a refugee from the Levantine coast. After tragedy casts Aqhat into the desert, a prophecy affords him the opportunity to slay three deities before the year's end and thereby become divine himself. Determined to right the wrongs of those responsible for his community's suffering, he and his companions join forces with Laeya, setting out to permanently revolutionize how mortals and gods interrelate--with consequences that even the gods cannot fathom. At once a speculative and historically attuned study of religion, Canaad brings the Ancient Near East to life in tangible and dramatic form, weaving together largely unknown histories and numerous fragmentary myths from a Canaanite perspective.
La Minga
"Mari didn't feel insane. She felt ... cagey, pushed to the edge by a malevolent brinkmanship, subject to some king who could seize or do away with her any time he pleased. Now that was a paranoid thought if there ever was one. But can a paranoid thought be true?"
One shift separates Marianela from flying home to celebrate the Dance of the Devils, her mother having volunteered her to perform its central role as La Minga. When Mari's hospital in New Orleans activates its emergency teams for a coming hurricane, however, a sequence of events gradually transforms her from committed nurse to committed psych patient. Determined to escape, she sets herself against the personal and impersonal monstrosities of her confinement, fomenting a second storm in her wake.