I have written widely about the connections between poetics and politics in the context of decolonization and its afterlives.

My monograph Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the end of Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2024) examines the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Drawing on extensive archival work, the book argues that the literary journal was a crucial form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English. The book advances a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, arguing that the anticolonial writing it examines offers a powerful tradition of relational thinking from which to think about the political and intellectual possibilities of comparison itself.

Anticolonial Form received an Honorable Mention for the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize.

My subsequent research extends these concerns across the decolonizing world and into the period following national independence.

Reading the Radio-Magazine: Culture, Decolonization and the PAIGC’s Rádio Libertação positions the multilingual radio magazine as both a successor to, and a transformation of, the anticolonial literary journal and its transnational networks.

In Stepping out of Line in Independent Conakry, I argue that close analysis of literary and cultural practice in 1960s Conakry reveals an aesthetics of dissent that emerged from, and defined itself against, the officially sanctioned aesthetics of national independence.

In 2023, I co-edited the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue “Southern Questions: Theory at Europe’s Colonial Frontiers” with Musab Younis. The issue brings the history of twentieth-century anticolonialism to bear on contemporary questions of migration, bordering, and Europe’s colonial legacies.

The same year, I was awarded a three-year British Academy Wolfson Fellowship to research the filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020). Using Maldoror’s films and wider cultural practice as a point of departure, this project investigates changing articulations of culture and politics in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in relation to the emergence of immigration as a central political question in Europe.

I am also developing a project on the colonial history of the idea of productivity, drawing on my interest in the political histories embedded in cultural forms and concepts.

Alongside my academic research, I work in broadcasting, journalism, and translation. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, I have made radio programmes that bring historical and cultural research to the general public, including Colonial Papersand I Arrive Without Leaving: The Story of Women Surrealist Poets. The London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Le Monde diplomatique, The Chicago Reviewand Dissent have published my writing on literature and politics. Alongside this work, I translate poetry and prose from French and Portuguese into English.