My research is motivated by three interrelated questions: (1) How do we understand the relationship between social hierarchy and political economy? (2) What forms of knowledge do subordinated groups produce to conceptualize and contest this relationship? (3) How do the connections between race, empire, and capitalism polarize democratic politics, shaping political identities in the US and transnationally? Methodologically, I address these questions by drawing on political theory, Black and anti-colonial political thought, and resistance movements targeting racial, colonial, and economic hierarchies. My research thus explores not only the co-configuration of political economy and forms of domination, but also how collective struggles against these entanglements shape democratic horizons.
My first book, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism, is now available from Columbia University Press.
I am currently working on two book projects. The first, Property Abolition: Reimagining Freedom and Democracy, examines how the critique of property relations emerging out of radical abolition, historically and in the present, unlocks insurgent forms of relationality, order, and political life beyond liberalism.
The second examines the crisis of democracy in India and the US through a transnational comparative lens. Putting the interwar and immediate postwar writings of Black thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Oliver Cox in conversation with Indian freedom fighters such as Aruna Asaf Ali, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, and Bhagat Singh, I situate the roots of Hindu nationalism and American neo-fascism within the dual consolidation of a global color-caste line and chauvinistic nation-building in the post-Depression era. The project also recovers forms of Afro-Asian solidarity that forwarded alternative conceptions of democracy against prevailing global and national political hierarchies.
