critical theory + music + literature + critical media practice + digital humanities
What happens when processes often understood as liberatory or experienced as effectual function as techniques of domination? This question runs through my broader research program, which approaches African and Black cultural expressions as sites for rethinking mediation, ethics, technology, and social life under contemporary conditions. My current book project examines a version of the question by asking what makes harm livable.
Book Project
Ease, Ethics, and Automatisms in Black Cultural Forms
In Black critical thought and early liberal philosophy, ease frequently figures as a desirable ethical condition: freedom from oppression, relief from labor, or mastery of skill. This project argues that in situations where actions cause harm precisely as they become automatic and effortless, ease no longer functions as ethical. Instead, it becomes an instrument of control. Reading novels, short stories, sound recordings, visual albums, and platform engagements, I examine the forms of control that ease takes under conditions of racial habituation and increasing technological automation: spontaneity, fluency, mastery. Each keyword tracks ease as a political and phenomenological problem across different social arrangements, opening new ways of thinking about ethics through Black aesthetics. “Ease, Ethics, and Automatisms” draws on a blend of literary, theoretical, and historical analyses, allowing it to bridge multiple disciplines, from literary and critical AI studies to music theory, phenomenology, and moral philosophy.
Articles
Decolonial AI: Algorithmic Colonialism and the Struggle for African (Technological) Futures – Accepted
Co-authored, this article uncovers the different ways in which AI systems embed and reproduce colonial asymmetries through data extraction, technological dependency, and unequal labor infrastructures. It offers applied recommendations for the Global North and South vis-à-vis participating in and producing pluriversal futures that eschew imperial patterns, while also concretizing Decolonial AI as an empirical toolkit.
Looped Things and Black Mimics - Ethnomusicology
This article examines sampling, looping, and digital interpolation as key aesthetics of Black expressive cultures. It revisits musical reuse as creative labor and listening practice within the global Black diaspora rather than mere imitation, challenging longstanding views of what mimicry is.
Afrobeats and the Gift of Praxis/Critique: Provisional Notes on a Non-Genre – The Black Scholar
This article examines the sensory necessity of productive friction by approaching Afrobeats less as a stable musical genre than as a flexible cultural formation. In its argument, the circulation of Afrobeats media generates forms of critique that unsettle aesthetic habituation and the normative evaluative principles behind them.
Sincere Intimacy, Genre, and Heteropology of a Confessional Public – African Studies
This article explores contemporary confessional African writing, especially digital personal essays, as a postcolonial form shaped by generative contradictions between the commercial logics of digital circulation, the aesthetics of shared resistance, and the private labor of narrativizing experience. The lifecycle of the modern digital literary anthology illustrates this paradox.
Africanfuturism – A New Commonsense? Apocalypse as Sense-Making after the Crises of Postcolonial Modernity – LLIDS
This article offers a philosophical and interpretive blueprint for Africanfuturism as a distinct intellectual and aesthetic formation. It argues that Africanfuturist works use apocalyptic imaginaries to make sense of the crisis and contradictions of postcolonial modernity.
See CV for other publications.
Forthcoming
Yoruba Social Life
Living Archives: Call-and-Response in the Age of Platforms
In Progress
From Sampling to Platformization: Copyright, Creative Labor, and Re-use in Nigeria's Digital Recording Culture