Book Projects
Racial Recursivity: Play, Race, and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Video Games (writing in-progress)
Racial Recursivity: Play, Race, and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Video Games develops racial recursivity as a critical framework for analyzing how race functions as a theme and ideology in video games. By examining how game mechanics, narrative structures, and paratextual game materials recursively reinforce socio-cultural ideas around race, racial recursivity reveals how racial logics are embedded within video games, game studies, and gaming culture. Racial recursivity aims to serve as a method of ludic-textual analysis and as a broader theoretical approach to game studies that allows us to understand how race in video games operates within a self-referential system that naturalizes larger racial formations through interactive play. By applying racial recursivity to major AAA video games, this dissertation demonstrates how a specific cohort of video games—Western AAA video games released between 2012 and 2020—function as a collective racial project that both reflects and reinforces neoliberal multicultural capitalism. Video games, as the dominant cultural form of the 21st century, lend cultural legitimacy to this racial-economic project by presenting inclusion within capitalism as the only redress for social inequality—a maneuver that elides deeper structural critiques of white supremacy and capitalism. Through their mechanics and narratives, these games invite players to participate in a racial regime that has sustained U.S. economic and cultural hegemony.
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Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature (research in-progress)
Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature charts how Black American writers have represented play while simultaneously charting the history and interconnected nature of play and American racial ideology. This project hopes to create a racial historiography of play and race in both American social-political history and across Black American literature across 6 proposed chapters. “Ludus as Impossibility: Play in the Slave Narrative” looks at how Slave narratives often present play as something impossible yet realized for the enslaved, especially the slave child in texts by William Grimes, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. “Ludus as a Losing Game” follows Eva’s claim in Toni Morrison’s Sula that “Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895” (68) to explore how Black writers have articulated the “rigged game” that Black people participate in called the American project and how writers have confronted the “games white folks play.” “Breaking the Rules” begins with that viral Twitter moment from 2020 when Black users rejected the official Uno Twitter account because Uno plays “their own damn game wrong “ as this entry point allows us to explore how Black gamers have historically broke rules and regulations around card games while navigating regimes of ludic control such as the anti-gambling laws of the Antebellum period that were then later used as legal precedent for prohibition-era bans on card houses and eventually anti-loitering laws. “(Dis)Ordered Ludic” argues the ephemeral nature of the Negro League Baseball clubs exemplifies a playful reading of Cedric Robinson’s theory of disorder—a breaking of the “ordered play” prioritized in Euro-centric Play Theory. “Gaming the System and Playing the Race Card” explores how 1980s conservative rhetoric framed the Welfare Queen as someone who allegedly “cheats” the system aka “the game” and argues that 90s and 2000s hip hop confronts and embrace the “cheat” with the rise of the “playa” image who uses criminality win the game. The final chapter “Black Ludic and Genre Play” turns to contemporary speculative fiction with writers like NK Jemisin, Colson Whitehead, and Victor Lavelle playing with literary form and genre to articulate an alternative imaginary in speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy while simultaneously navigating the game that is market expectations that the contemporary publishing apparatus has of Black writers to write a particular type of fiction.
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