Work in Progress
- I am in the early stages of a larger book project on what I call 'world literary value.' This book aims to develop a new account of the way literary value is produced, articulated, and circulated in relation to non-literary value domains. The book focus on the dominant role of the USA, and especially of New York-based institutions, in the contemporary creation of world literary value.
- As a kind of spin-off of this monograph project, I am the PI on a project entitled 'Harlem, Capital of World Literature? James Baldwin's 21st-Century Career and the Dynamics of World Literature.' This project develops an in-depth study of the twenty-first century consecration of James Baldwin as a transnational literary and political figure. Looking at the role of tourism, film, anthologies, intertextuality, politics, and other valuedomains, the project has a double aim: to arrive at an exhaustive account of Baldwin's posthumous career, and to develop a better understanding of the way literature and other value-domains interact to produce 'world literary value.'
- Tom Toremans and I also co-direct a project entitled 'Righting the Black Atlantic,' which reassesses the notion of the Black Atlantic as a key term for capturing transnational mobility for our current age of involuntary displacement and human rights violations. The project investigates an understudied corpus of twentieth-century expatriate African American writing that is marked by the imprint of encounters with international law.
- With Núria Codina, I am co-editing a special issue of Interventions entitled Pluralizing the Minor: Forms, Figures, Circulation. The collection argues that existing accounts of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, JanMohamed and Lloyd, Casanova) reduce minor literatures to their relation to a major force or to a particular poetics, and that a more "plural" account of the minor allows world literature studies to explore underinvestigated aesthetic strategies.