I’ve authored four books. I have book pages for my two most recent – Glissant and the Middle Passage and Levinas and the Postcolonial – which include snippets from and links to reviews.

A few remarks …

The first, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (SUNY 2001) is a revision of my dissertation written under the direction of Robert Bernasconi. It articulates a temporal language of difference, rendered from the work of Emmanuel Levinas when read in a phenomenological frame, that attends to the infinity at the heart of the interhuman. In many ways, despite the massive and decisive textual and geographic variations that follow, it remains the theoretical basis for most of my thinking and writing. I then wrote Godard Between Identity and Difference (Bloomsbury 2008) as a sort of labor of love: Godard is my favorite filmmaker and I’ve always thought there is something philosophical that his use of sound and image makes possible. So I composed this book as an appreciation of that possibility, but also toward the end of thinking difference more politically and more radically in a transnational sense, attentive to historical experiences of race and nation. (You can read about my shift in reading, writing, and thinking on my Research page.)

Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh 2012) and Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minnesota 2019) are full explorations of historical experience and the transnational. In the former, I enact the work of decolonization, asking what it would mean to read Levinas’ work as a part of long-standing colonial sensibilities, but also perforated in those sensibilities and open to more transformative senses of alterity. To that end, I offer readings of Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos as sites of intellectual decolonization and radicalization. In the latter, I turn to the poetry and poetics of Glissant in order to reckon with the legacy and meaning of the Middle Passage for Black life in the Americas, arguing that his critical work reflects an attentiveness to the paradoxes, contradictions, and chaotic signification of catastrophe: at once unimaginable pain and, through the work of creolization, world-making beauty. Glissant’s careful yet daring reckoning with the Middle Passage offers an argument for the profundity of small places and vernacular culture. For me, in my writing and thinking, this is a paradigm shifting insight.

I am also at work on a number of other projects that grow out of Glissant’s work and the terms of his argument, which you can read about on my Work In Progress page.