Publications

In my current book manuscript as well as my essays, I examine multiethnic North American writing for its thematic preoccupation with history. To what end, I ask, does contemporary writing engage history as content, and historical forms?

“The Aesthetics of Social Reproduction: Silences in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.”

Cultural Critique 124 (2024): 100-126.

This essay, an excerpt from my book project, examines the representation of feminized labor in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler. I focus on the tendency of the first-person narrators to flounder or fail as they attempt to describe cooking, cleaning and sex, a tendency that grows out of Butler’s and Atwood’s engagement with Tillie Olsen’s theory of silences.

“Dead Man Working: Labor, Race, and Genre in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days”

Under review

This essay examines the fiction of Colson Whitehead in relation to Marx’s concept of dead labor.