Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlink Text: Creating Community Through Dystopia, Electronic Book Review, Summer 2025 (invited)

Dark Souls (2011) was a transformative moment for the video game industry that solidified FromSoftware as a leading developer, inaugurated Hidetaka Miyazaki as a video game auteur, and established the increasingly popular Souls-like genre. Yet, Dark Souls has been relatively underappreciated in Game Studies. This presentation seeks two major interventions: (1) position Dark Souls as the preeminent networked hyperlinked text, and (2) argue the game’s dystopian digital world allows players to engage in an imaginative world that cannily explores life after late-stage capitalistic destruction and global iniquity.

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Manufacturing Consent to Whiteness in Game Studies, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2025 (under peer-review).

In this upcoming article, I argue that academic game studies has actively contributed to the codification of presumed white hetero-masculine subjectivity in gaming by establishing a gamic grammar that manufactures a collective consent to (white) subjectivity in games. By gamic grammar, I invoke Ken McAllister’s argument that games establish a medium specific grammar that is “always already embedded in their sociocultural context” (29) as well as Hortense J. Spillers’ seminal essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” that argues the actualized symbolic racial ordering established during American slavery created an “American grammar” that informs the collective racial ideology of the American project (68). It naturally follows that Western game design practices are, at the very least, implicitly informed by larger social structures, yet we might expect academic game studies to probe gamic texts and trouble their complicity in Western racial worlding practices. While there are many individual works in games studies that trouble gaming’s complicity in some of these practices, the overarching gamic grammar of game studies still centralizes whiteness. 

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Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, Victorians and Video Games, Routledge, 2025 (forthcoming).

In this upcoming book chapter, I look at the HP Lovecraft-inspired 2015 video game,  Bloodborne. It is my suggestion that Bloodborne is unintentionally informed by racist discourses around blood and blood mixing that emerged in the 19th-century and subsequently influenced Lovecraft’s racism and writings. Further, Bloodborne’s recursive gameplay loop—the constant returning of enemies no matter how many times you slay them—unintentionally highlights how racist narratives, such as those of biological blood, continue to haunt contemporary popular culture such as video games. 

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Race in Early Modern Video Games, Kula, 2024 (forthcoming).

In this upcoming video essay, I explore the persistent myth of an all-white Anglo-Saxon European past while looking at how this myth impacts video game design.  

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The Persistent Lack of Racial Diversity in English Studies, ADE Bulletin, Iss. 161, September 2024.

This upcoming article explores the continual lack of racial diversity in English studies. I begin with a discussion of persistent whiteness within English studies before turning to the role of HBCUs in diversifying English. I conclude by looking at the recent Supreme Court decision to end affirmative action and examine how this decision may make diversifying English PhD programs even more difficult.

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Blackening the Frame: Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr, Popular Culture Review, Summer 2023

This article looks at Kerry James Marshall's comic series Rythm Mastr and argues Marshall is “blackening the frame” with his African-centric, Yoruba-influenced comic series. Rythm Mastr—like much of his artistic work—is “blackening” because the series is Marshall’s corrective to the overwhelming whiteness of canonical comics and the silencing and erasure of Africans in Western popular culture writ large. It is a “blackening” of white Eurocentric political hegemony, which in the words of Hall, “is these days waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else” (257). “The frame” invokes three referents: the “frame” around a singular scene in a comic, the “frame” of paintings in an art museum, and the way that Black subjects have been historically “framed” by non-Black artists and writers. By “blackening the frame,” Marshall uses the medium of comics within the art museum to explore Black history and reframe American popular culture towards an African-oriented future. Marshall’s incorporation of Yoruba figures within the superhero genre allows him to base his story within African mythology rather than European cultural icons. “Blackening the frame” is part of a larger discourse where Black cartoonists respond to “muted blackness,” which Qiana Whitted suggests is “transnational racial discourses” in canonical non-Black authored comics that “have historically marked and muted blackness” (79). Marshall, like the Black cartoonists that Whitted considers, responds to and rejects “muted blackness” to restore the agency of the Black subject. The decidedly African-influenced Rythm Mastr is part of a broader insurgence among Black comic creators like Kwanza Osajyefo that are unapologetically demanding a central place within comics while refusing to capitulate to market demands to include Western, i.e., white, referents.

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“Aquatic Knowledge for Those Who Know”: Drexciya as Black
Cultural Praxis, Bodies of Water in African American Fiction & Film, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, May 2023 

This chapter looks at the Drexciya myth, invented by the Detroit House due of the same name, that posits a Black Atlantis called Drexciya that is populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off the slave ships during the Middle Passage. I would like to suggest Drexciya as a creative praxis of Black hydropoetics that turns to the undersea as a liberatory space for people of the African diaspora. Through the act of aquatic submergence, Drexciya and the Black Atlantis provide a praxis for interpreting Black cultural production that engages with the underwater space as a site of potentiality and belonging as opposed to one of enslavement and death. I suggest Drexciya may be positioned as a way of reading Black hydropoetics for Black liberation and creative possibility. Drexciya posits that Black people have a uniquely kindred relationship with the undersea that fostered the creation of a Black utopia entirely outside of hegemonic white supremacy and capitalist modernity. The Drexciyans mutated into the more-than-human and subsequently surpassed land-confined humanity in technological innovation, nautical abilities, and ethics. Drexciya is part of a larger Black radical tradition—which Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery note, “has always been engaged with the undersea” (35)—that is submarine.

 

Literary Alibi: The Consumption of African American and Dalit Literatures, The Comparatist: Comparative Racism Special Issue, Oct. 2022

Alibi is “a claim that one was elsewhere when an act, typically a criminal one, is alleged to have taken place.” I argue many White people participate in a system of innocence by association where they use their familiarity with literature created by people of color to proclaim their own racial innocence—a phenomenon I call Literary Alibi. African American writers have seen extraordinary and deserved acclaim, but structural racism remains. Dalits in India occupy a similar social position. Aniket Jaaware elucidates the dangers of conflating literary revolution with social revolution in his work on Dalit literature when he writes, “we could always eat the Dalit by consuming his speech, thus satisfying our so easily satisfiable conscience” (287). Using Jaaware as a springboard, I argue that a comparison between African American and Dalit literature is not only valid but necessary by examining the rich history between African American and Dalit literature. I foreground my concept of Literary Alibi in a comparative analysis of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues and Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha—representative poetry collection of the African American and Dalit literary canons. In particular, I focus on how both poets resist simple metonymic readings by using modernist poetic techniques such as shifting perspectives, heteroglossia, dialectic, and free verse. In doing so, Hughes and Dhasal resist false intimacy and reject Literary Alibi by refusing to “offer an excuse” for their White or upper-caste readers. I conclude by arguing that we must foreswear Literary Alibi and embrace measurable legislative action to address race and caste injustice.  

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“He must have caught a stray bullet”: Police Brutality in The Walking Dead, ASAP/J, Oct. 2021

This article looks at the representations of police in the comic series The Walking Dead  and argues The Walking Dead negotiates the racially rooted trust and suspicion of the police in American culture and, more importantly, reveals how pro-police narratives told through the white gaze actively ignore testimony from Black citizens victimized by the police.

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