I am a literary geohistoriographer and critical theorist trained in black studies, philology, feminist/queer studies, and languages (Italian, Russian, German, French, and Modern Standard Arabic). My writing tarries—with disciplinary profligacy—in joyous orientation to black belonging, otherwise archives of Afrodiasporic invention and freedomscapes. I theorise racialised gender, black nonbinary method, and trans poetics. I study [fascist/colonial/imperial/settler] narratives of crisis and citizenship, racial capitalism, border injustices, and black, migrant, trans cultural production. This work is informed by commitments to black internationalism, trans liberation, my own positionality and communal attachments, including years spent involved with various social justice movements and literary/arts collectives. Below are descriptions of book manuscripts in progress. For recent publications (most w/ open PDF access) see here; live performance and sound artworks found here.
Where Blackness Meets the Sea
Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean theorises belonging via representations of blackness, gender, and migrancy in contemporary Black and migrant writing, social movements, and cultural production primarily in/across the Eurafrican Mediterranean. The book is organized through a series of figurative and geopolitical terrains—the sea, the citizen, the border, the port, the jungle, and the sea, otherwise. It underscores the material and psychological violence of Frontex Europe in conjunction with the legacies of colonial and fascist Italy and other Mediterranean/European nation states by discussing the politics of citizenship without relying on the desire to redeem or reconcile its oppressive legal hierarchies. Thus, this project departs from liberal narratives about normative approaches to cultural belonging or “acceptance” of racialised difference in the Mediterranean, Europe, and Italy from the period of Italian Unification to the contemporary moment by historicizing the Black Mediterranean in conversation with the Caribbean poetics, Atlantic histories, and the cultural production engendered across the sea.
Transnational Black Studies
Transnational Black Studies (forthcoming from Liverpool University Press) includes work by scholars, activists, and creative writers engaging transnational encounters, fissures and turns across black studies and its dynamic and translingual genealogies (including Caribbean Studies, African[a] Studies, and radical literary, ethnoreligious, and political traditions). It articulates how proliferating questions from the study and experience of Black life impact the stakes of modern languages and cultural studies. Edited by SA Smythe, this volume teaches and furthers what is possible in an already global black studies at a conjuncture beyond containment from national borders, linguistic, and disciplinary confines.
proclivity
proclivity is a full poetry collection. Weaving choreopoem, erasure, and other archipelagic forms, the book traces a familial history of black migration (Britain, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Italy), trans embodiment, and our many tendencies against\/towards freedom dreaming. The sections of proclivity refract into three transmedia suites composed of monoprint collages, installation, live performance, and soundscape compositions. Three (3) movements comprise each suite, for a total of distinct but interrelated works:
- Proclivity Suite No. 1
- movement I – ( null ) [opening suite]
- movement II – (A.D.S.R) ADSR [attacco.decadimento.sostiene.rilascio.]
- movement III – wolf notes
- Proclivity Suite No. 2
- movement IV – /soft flux/
- movement V – averseaversavers
- movement VI – Mannish Waters
- Proclivity Suite No. 3
- movement VII – FAVLTY
- movement VIII – {spirit forged}
- movement IX – Nine Nights
SA Smythe, PhD 