My research contributes to political theories of gender and embodiment, African American political thought, and the intersection of democratic theory, biopolitics, and public health. I am currently at work on a book project, and two articles drawn from dissertation chapters. My next projects will be, first, a monograph on the political thought of Audre Lorde and, second, a theorization of the discourse and phenomenon of racial disparities in health since the 1980s. I outline each in turn.

My book project, The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, tracks the trajectory of black infant mortality as a political problem from 1800 to the present, with an emphasis on the half-century between 1890 and 1940. I argue that the 2:1 ratio of black to white infant death in the US, nearly constant for over a century, expresses a striking continuity in the devaluation of African American life in the United States. In recent years, more than 4000 African American babies have died each year than would have if there were parity between black and white infant mortality rates—eleven babies each day of the year, and counting. My book casts this staggeringly disproportionate visitation of death on African American communities as a crucial, albeit unspectacular, manifestation of contemporary political violence. It traces both the shifting official conceptualizations of black infant mortality as a political problem– from “proof” of African American degeneracy in the late 19th century to today’s research on the epigenetic impacts of systemic racism—as well as responses of key black thinkers and actors to these official framings and interventions, and to the tragic phenomenon itself. I am currently in dialogue with two presses, which have each solicited a formal proposal; I am preparing the prospectus and will submit the manuscript by Spring 2016.

The first chapter draws on primary public health and policy documents as well as secondary historical sources to analyze the official conceptualizations of disparate African American infant mortality rates, and associated interventions, between 1890 and 1940. I identify two successive paradigms of what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” or states’ attempts to optimize their populations’ collective life in ways that tend to entail racially exclusionary elements: 1) the “race traits” configuration (1890-1910s), which diagnosed high rates of infant mortality as “proof” of African Americans’ fatal degeneracy, and 2) the Sheppard-Towner configuration (1920-1940), characterized by more sympathetic and inclusionary investigations of the problem, but racially bifurcated programs of response. This analysis entails a critique of Theda Skocpol’s account of Progressive Era “maternalist” political successes as insufficiently attentive to the ways that anti-black racism configured these policies in the South to prioritize the preservation of racial—as well as, secondarily, gender and professional—hierarchies over substantive improvements in conditions for mothers and infants. I argue that the Sheppard-Towner paradigm instituted a decontextualized biopolitics of black infant mortality that still structures policy today.

While the first chapter employs the concept of biopolitics, the remaining chapters stage an encounter between Foucualdian biopolitics and alternative approaches to theorizing the political violence of mortality disparities, as well as opposition to that violence. Chapter 2 draws on Orlando Patterson’s concept of social death, taken up by scholars of what Saidiya Hartman terms “the afterlife of slavery,” to describe infancy as a key site at which notions of racial difference crystallized over the course of the 19th century. I draw on historical accounts of mourning and funereal practices in both white bourgeois households and on Southern plantations to argue that the new category of “true babyhood” that emerged in the antebellum decades, like “true womanhood,” was figured as white. I show that, as this new category of priceless but highly vulnerable personhood was crucial in galvanizing public concern for infant mortality after the Civil War, black babies were excluded from the biopolitical interventions to improve infant survival. I argue that this racially exclusionary ontology of “true babyhood” is still discernible in public health interventions today.

Chapter 3 uses rhetorical theory to supplement the analytic of biopolitics. I argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’ elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First Born” in The Souls of Black Folk, employs two rhetorical modes, which I call normalizing and insurrectionary, to contest scientific racist logics of the “race traits” configuration, particularly as propounded by the influential statistician Frederick Hoffman, whose Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896) excluded blacks from both the national and human future. This chapter also offers a feminist critique of Du Bois’ normalizing mode, pointing up the absence of gender analysis in recent political theoretical engagements with Du Bois’ rhetoric. I presented part of this chapter at the 2014 Western Political Science Association meeting, and am preparing a revised version for submission to a journal by December 2015.

Chapter 4 uses sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory to illuminate the materialities of African American midwives’ everyday politics of care under Southern states’ maternal-infant health campaigns, 1920-1960. I show that the standardized bags issued to midwives played key roles in the enactment of both biopolitical exclusion and resistance. Using Latour’s emphasis on everyday objects as participants in our political worlds, I focus on midwives’ bags to develop a fine-grained understanding of Southern black midwives’ work under racial domination as a micropolitics of care. An article manuscript based on this chapter received a revise and resubmit from Contemporary Political Theory; I am currently revising and plan to resubmit by January 2016.

The concluding chapter explores the ways that black midwives across the country frame in explicitly political terms their work to eliminate racial inequities in infant and maternal survival at a grassroots level by providing comprehensive, unconditional care for black mothers and infants. Situating these practices within the long tradition of black health activism, I theorize them as a form of affirmative biopolitics, and consider the lessons that it holds for designing responsive and just public policy.

My second book project will be the first book-length explication of Audre Lorde’s political thought, putting her writings into dialogue with the political thought of Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler. Among other things, I will argue that Lorde’s understanding of individual and collective survival as essentially creative disturbs Beauvoir’s distinctions between immanence and transcendence, while also, building on Sharon Holland’s work, identifying deep resonances between their accounts of power, authenticity, and the erotic, which throw into relief a pronounced (but little-noticed) existentialist aspect in Lorde’s work. Drawing on recent queer of color theory, I think through the “generational” differences—especially around gender normativity—as well as significant convergences in Baldwin and Lorde’s respective existentialisms. I use Lorde’s and Spillers’ materialist account of our bodies as deeply historical, constituted by political, social, and ecological environments over time, to rework Arendt’s key concept of natality. For Arendt, the capacity to act politically is rooted in natality—the condition of having been born as a completely new human being—because political action consists of creating a new configuration of the world. Preserving Arendt’s focus on birth’s promise as the basis of politics, I reformulate natality as an embodied potential whose realization requires a political confrontation with the histories that constitute both the body and its milieu. Finally, I develop the connections between Wynter, Lorde and Butler to think through the intertwined political pasts and futures of race, gender, and ecology.

An additional project will theorize the contradictory co-evolution, since the late 1960s, of increasing governmental and public health concern for racial disparities in infant mortality and other health indicators, on one hand, and punishing social policies that demonstrably exacerbate those disparities, on the other. In particular, I will investigate the conditions of production and response to the landmark 1985 HHS Heckler Report on Black and Minority Health, which precipitated the establishment of the Office of Minority Health amidst the retrenchment of social programs under Reagan. I will also further explore both the possibilities and dangers of the epigenetic explanations for health disparities, which attribute racial inequities in health to multifarious harms of the racist environment that African American women face over the life course, perhaps beginning during fetal life and possibly enduring over multiple generations. This project, which builds on my dissertation research on public health responses to racial disparities in infant mortality, may issue in a series of articles or a book manuscript.