I am Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and my research engages questions of colonialism, postcolonialism, empire, racial politics, and social theory, examining how historical structures of power continue to shape contemporary political and social life. My current work focuses on the enduring legacies of colonialism in shaping citizenship politics and conceptions of liberal democracy. I approach these questions from the vantage point of the Caribbean as a critical site of global historical transformations and I am particularly interested in how Black radical and anticolonial thought can inform social theory and knowledge politics.
I am currently writing a book on abolition in the British and French Caribbean, exploring how dominant, liberal visions of abolition overshadowed radical alternatives imagined by revolutionaries from below. This work recovers political imaginaries erased from European political genealogies, offering a radical rethinking of democracy grounded in anticolonial peasant struggles. I am also co-editing an upcoming volume, Upending the Color Line: Towards a Du Boisian Sociological Methodology (Duke University Press). My research has been published in Sociological Theory, Du Bois Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Political Power and Social Theory, and Teaching Sociology.
At Berkeley, I co-lead the Anticolonial Lab alongside Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz and Tianna Paschel, which examines sites of anticolonial solidarity across the world, with a particular focus on movements in the Caribbean and the Bay Area.
Before joining Berkeley, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I hold a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
““I came to understand that, as a colonised subject, I was inserted into history by negation, backwards and upside down – like all Caribbean peoples, dispossessed and disinherited from a past that was never properly ours. We were condemned to be out of place or displaced, transported to a phantasmatic zone of the globe where history never happened as it should. We were conscripted into modernity as peculiarly wayward foot-soldiers.” (Stuart Hall 2017)”
Artist: Ebony G. Patterson, “A View In” (detail) (2015)
Image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery