Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
I co-edited this collection of fiction, radical reportage, and essays by the early 20th century Bengali feminist activist and speculative fiction writer, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The book features several new translations of Hossain’s writings from Bengali by my co-editor at Princeton, Ben Baer, including a first full translation of Abarodh-Basini (Woman-Prisoner or The Secluded Ones). The volume, published by Warbler Press, includes a series of artworks, inspired by Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream,” by the Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, along with an artist’s statement. “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is widely considered the first modern feminist utopia, as it precedes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) by a decade. The collection also includes a foreword by the first Bangladeshi American New York City Council Member Shahana Hanif, and a short preface by the late postmodern Bangladeshi author Akhtaruzzaman Elias.
Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts
I compiled this anthology of American literature with Ulrich Baer, University Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU. Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (Warbler Press, 2020) brings together a series of “firsts” in American literary history. It uses “primacy” as a heuristic to shine light on a much more diverse tradition than the one customarily taught in many U.S. high school and college classrooms. By approaching American literature through a number of “firsts”—e.g. the first American queer novel, the first play by an Asian American author, etc.—the anthology provides a teachable resource for the humanities curriculum that centers the many BIPOC and queer contributions to this country’s literary past.
Scholarly Writing
2024. “Introduction: Spider-Mother.” Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein. (with Ben Baer)
2022. “Afterword: Anthropology and Science Fiction.” The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations. Special issue of Anthropology and Humanism.
2021. “Octavia Butler and the Settler Colonial Speculative: Xenogenesis and Planetary Loss.” Our Shared Planet. Special issue of American Studies.
2021. “Translator’s Note (Militarism in Asia).” In Barricade: A Journal of Translation and Anti-Fascism.
2020. “Introduction.” Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts. (with Ulrich Baer)
2017. “Meine Freiheit, die es so noch nicht gibt: Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus.” Interventions.
2016. “Cityzenship: Rightful Presence and the Urban Commons.” Affective Citizenship. Special issue of Citizenship Studies. (with Wanda Vrasti)
Book Reviews
2024. “A Usable Queer Past.” Review of Queer Forms, by Ramzi Fawaz. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
2022. Review of Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, by Jayna Brown. The Black Scholar.
2021. Review of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynell George. Harvard Review.
2020. “Utopia in Black.” Review of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism, by Alex Zamalin. Social Text.
2020. Review of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, by Sami Schalk. Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
2019. “Participatory Colonialism.” Review of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention, by Jaskiran Dhillon. Critical Ethnic Studies.
Translations
2022 [2020]. Che Gossett. “Abolitionistische Alternativen: Schwarzer Radikalismus und die Verweigerung von Reform.” In Abolitionismus: Ein Reader. Eds. Daniel Loick and Vanessa E. Thompson. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
2021 [1930]. M.P.T. Acharya. “Militarism in Asia: The Obligations of European Workers.” In Barricade: A Journal of Translation and Anti-Fascism.
2018 [2013]. Zülfukar Çetin. “The Dynamics of Queer Politics and Gentrification in Berlin.” In The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary Germany: Essays on Racism, Capitalism and Sexual Politics. Ed. Christopher Sweetapple.