简介

Currently, I am at work on a book manuscript titled "The Racial Railroad." This project examines the prevalence of the train as a setting for scenes of racial formation and conflict in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. I argue that the train has played a formative role in these narratives not only because of its centrality in the histories of communities of color, but also because it acts as a space of compulsory sociability across race, gender, and class, despite the strivings of the state to segregate based on those categories. As such, riding the train often calls into question the relationship between the subject, time, space, and community – all of which are constitutive of how racialized bodies are articulated.