As a comparatist, my research profile reflects the interdisciplinary dimensions of my field. My published works and ongoing research cover subjects that include global hip-hop, transnational black studies, postcolonial queer criticism, afrofuturism and African cinema, as well as critical pedagogy and comparative literature studies. For example, in the context of the growing tide of islamophobia in France, my forthcoming article in the Journal of Hip-Hop Studies examines the ways in which Muslim rap artists have contested and answered xenophobic discourses about their communities by historicizing, reinterpreting and appropriating French republican concepts such as laïcité (secularism) as an integral part of their French-Muslim identity. In the process, these Muslim rappers seek to question the antagonistic roles they are forced to occupy in mainstream political discourse by presenting themselves as the true heirs of French republican ideals. It is by pointing at the hypocrisy of criminalizing and forcing Muslim women to remove the hijab or the burkini in the name of women’s rights that French Muslim rappers like Médine seek to deconstruct such prejudices. They highlight the contradictions of French republican universalism, whose hostility to hyphenated particularisms that expand what it means to be French tends to instead facilitate policies that are exclusionary and reinforces the very communautarian identities that combative secularists seek to dismantle.
Aside from France, my scholarship on hip-hop also extends to places Kenya as well as the United States. My published work on Kenyan hip-hop focuses on the ways in which the memory of the Mau Mau uprising against British colonialism has affected contemporary Kenyan popular culture and politics. The historical legacy of the Mau Mau has emerged as a contested space in which various groups have attempted to articulate and impose their own interests. These debates have pitted loyalists against Mau Mau veterans, Kikuyus against other ethnic groups, and major political parties against each other. The significance of the Mau Mau movement has caused it to retain the status as an important point of reference when discussing Kenya’s political future. The memory of the movement has been employed to depict and critique social injustices in contemporary Kenyan society. These discussions have taken place not only in published works but also in songs. For instance, the rap song “Angalia Saa” (Watch the Time), sang by the Kenyan hip-hop group named Kalamashaka, provides an example of the Mau Mau’s impact on the country’s contemporary popular culture. It is by assuming the personae of Mau Mau fighters that hip-hop artists like Kalamashaka (or K-Shaka) have attempted to communicate their own sense of authenticity. The Mau Mau revolt has emerged as the “authentic” event to which they have asserted their fidelity. This “authentic” event has given them the moral authority to make claims about the present and posit alternative futures. I therefore examine how the artistic depictions of the personae of Mau Mau fighters, performed through hip-hop music, dramatize the intense confluence of a series of cultural gestures: on the one hand, a concatenation of pre-colonial, para-colonial, post-colonial phenomena; on the other hand, local and global influences informing the political and poetic frames of reference which are used to diagnose the present.
The years I have spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden and the United States have highly defined my academic projects which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African Diaspora and African American Studies. In this sense, my scholarship incorporates both Anglophone and francophone regions of the African continent. For example, in a forthcoming article, published by the Journal of the African Literature Association, I examine how both Jean-Pierre Bekolo (a francophone African filmmaker from Cameron) and Wanuri Kahiu (an Anglophone African filmmaker from Kenya) deploy afrofuturist aesthetics in their films Les Saignantes (2005) and Pumzi (2009) as a way of drawing attention to and critiquing afro-pessimist perspectives through which many African countries are often diagnosed. It is by juxtaposing political realities against the narrative and aesthetic conventions of film genres that Bekolo’s work interrogates the seemingly immutable perspectives from which African realities are examined or perceived. Both Bekolo and Kahiu’s films are set in dystopic futures. Kahiu’s film, Pumzi, seeks to question the fatality and immutability of present African realities by engaging dystopian politics. It is ultimately through the poetics of Afro-futurism that both films critique the present status quo in order to imagine alternative futures. In other words, afrofuturism is employed by Bekolo and Kahiu as an aesthetics of hope, which, by placing African bodies in futuristic landscapes, dismantles a cultural logic—an essentializing afro-pessimism—that sees African countries as existing outside of time, “progress,” and modernity.
My ongoing work on queer postcolonial theory historicizes contemporary opposition to LGBTQ rights in many parts of the African continent as a product of the battle (and subsequent synthesis) between colonial technologies of power—which were often enforced by policing and pathologizing the customs, family structures and sexual bodies of colonized subjects through the dogmatic dictates of missionary evangelism—and anticolonial forms of resistance that partially articulated their revolutionary impetus through a heterosexual matrix dipped in notions of tradition and “Africanness.” I therefore trace the ways in which the rhetorical parameters used to debate LGBTQ rights in many parts of the continent emerge as contemporary permutations of both the colonial legacy, including the institutionalization of sodomy laws in British colonies, as well as the discursive strategies of resistance adopted by the colonized. It is through a queer reading of canonical works of African literature, such as Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya (1938), that I seek to outline such genealogies.
There is often a symbiotic relationship between my research and my teaching. For example, my research on the relationship between pedagogy and comparative literature focuses on how college classrooms have become the dominant spaces in which texts emerging from different national and cultural traditions circulate. From this perspective, questions of translatability and homogenized reading become increasingly important in comparative and world literature classes. In my forthcoming article on the relationship between critical pedagogy and comparative literature (published by The Comparatist), I analyze how the theoretical and deontological quandaries affecting the discipline are inextricably linked to teaching. By this I mean that the act of teaching comparative literature is essentially a theoretical exercise. To teach comparative and world literature is to adopt, iterate or reject a number of theoretical positions. Due to its methodological focus, I contend that the discipline of comparative literature offers significant insights on the role and applications of critical pedagogy in literature classes. This aspect of my research, therefore, focuses on the ways in which the practice of teaching is part and parcel of the performative dimensions through which comparative literature should articulate its method and theorizes itself.