Research

I view my work as a means by which to give voice to the historical and material realities of white supremacy by uncovering the configurations of power-knowledge that produce racially differentiated subjectivities and lifeworlds of precarity. My work addresses questions at the intersection of philosophy of race, philosophy of law, and social ontology examined through an imperial genealogy of modernity. I am additionally developing a Foucauldian conception of “juridical power” grounded in the Ancient Greek notion of the nomos.

My long-term research projects exist along three trajectories:

  1. The first seeks to rehabilitate imperium as an analytic of power that can capture the structural functioning and global orientation of white supremacy. Said differently, it suggests that we understand white supremacy as an imperial rationality of power that transcends the binaries—citizen/non-citizen, domestic/foreign, police/military, state/market—deployed in modern political discourse.
  2. The second draws on the tools of critical phenomenology to rethink the (liberal) juridical subject as a fundamentally pre-traumatized subject. I argue that this subject both works to render myriad modes of harm juridically illegible and allows for the proliferation of what I call state-sanctioned traumatization—enacted through systemic racism, militarism, law, and other forms of race-based structural violence—that maintains racialized populations in lifeworlds of slow death.
  3. The third interrogates the onto-epistemological construction of modern political subjects—such as the citizen, the criminal, the combatant, and the refugee—as a strategy of securing and maintaining an imperial world order grounded in capitalist white supremacism.

Forthcoming & Planned Work

Planned: “Trauma and Liberal Subjectivity: Phenomenological Erasure and the Racial Politics of Harm”

Planned: “Law and the Order of Things: Foucault’s Nomos and Juridical Ontopower”

Monograph: Imperial Nomos

I am developing a monograph proposal that is inspired by my past scholarship as well as my personal investment in issues of systemic, racial violence and the politics of statelessness. Sensitive to the increasingly indisputable realities of global white supremacy and Western imperialism, the monograph centers the nomos as a political-legal heuristic for understanding the modern global order. By putting Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of the nomos in conversation with Carl Schmitt’s account of the jus publicum Europeaum as the “second nomos of the Earth,” the monograph relocates the genealogical origin of what Foucault terms “modern power” in the Age of Discovery. What emerged during this period is what I call an “imperial nomos” that has governed and continues to govern what Denise da Silva calls the “onto-epistemological” production and management of racialized subjects within a white supremacist matrix of power. The project suggests that the imperial nomos is today exemplified by the refugee regime, and is particularly visible in the invocation of “persecution” as a means of policing the boundaries of political, social, and economic inclusion in the service of white/Western hegemony.