Book Projects
Gamic Grammar: Global Racialization in Contemporary Video Games (research in-progress)
I will meaningfully build upon my dissertation research by restructuring the books into two parts. Part 1 is largely rooted in my dissertation research and will finetune the first four chapters to argue contemporary Western video games support neoliberal racial ideology and American hegemony. The first chapter argues Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is a critical satire of the Western genre that reveals how capitalist impulses will always unmake collectivism and perpetrate violence against historically marginalized groups, yet the game cannot fully divest itself of the Western’s racial legacy and reinscribes a discreet racial taxonomy indebted to American Nativism. The second chapter explores two games inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): Far Cry 2 (2008) and Spec Ops: The Line (2012). Positioning these games within a longer lineage of Western philosophical judgments of Africa as a place Hegel claimed had “no historical part of the world,” the chapter argues both games imagine Africa as a “no place” playground for players to roam and discover their humanity, revealing the central role Africa continues to play in the construction of Western humanism. The third chapter examines three cyberpunk video games: Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Dues Ex: Mankind Divided (2016), and Detroit: Become Human (2018). These games fetishize and fear Japan, position Haiti and the Caribbean as technologically primitive, center white subjectivity, celebrate a depoliticized multiculturalism, and malevolently support collective misrememberings of Black and Civil Rights history.The fourth chapter argues The Last of Us Part II (2020) exemplifies the tepid and toothless embrace of intersectionality that has characterized the game industry over the last decade. The game uncritically adopts intersectionality by including queer and POC supporting characters whose only role is to humanize the white women dual protagonists. Part 2 takes up from my dissertation’s final chapter and explores how non-Western games have contended with Western hegemony by confronting racialization and other techniques of control. The fifth chapter is an expansion of the Bloodborne chapter in my dissertation and argue that the Japanese developer FromSoftware is animated by a desire to critique western worlding projects and refuses racialization. The sixth chapter takes up the South Korean game Lies of P (2023) and argues the game confronts the West’s long-standing influence on South Korea with its rewriting of Pinocchio while simultaneously confronting Japan’s imperial legacy with its gamic reference to the Japanese developer FromSoftware. The final chapter looks at emerging African games like Tales of Kenzera (Zau) (2024) and argues recent games from the continent are indicative of an emerging video game culture that refuses Western racialization and centers African diasporic voices.
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.