" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Co-host of #TWiBRa­dio and Man­ag­ing Edi­tor of This Week in Black­ness dot com.
Cal­i­forn­ian.
Domes­tic War­rior.
Doc­toral stu­dent in Amer­i­can Stud­ies at NYU.
Lover of iced cof­fee, his­tor­i­cal minu­tiae, mind-bending the­ory, Twi­light Zone marathons, gad­gets, and talk­ing loud.

Con­tact

daciatakesnote@gmail.com

If you Google me, you’ll find this:

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Academia.edu
Mende­ley

F.A.Q.

Q. What’s your dis­ser­ta­tion about?

A. Many grad­u­ate stu­dents hate this ques­tion because, depend­ing on where they are in their process, they don’t have a clear answer. The fol­low­ing is about as suc­cinct as I can get with­out caus­ing a nosebleed.

In this dis­ser­ta­tion, Writ­ten All Over Their Faces: Car­i­ca­tur­ing the Failed White Body in the Eigh­teenth Cen­tury Atlantic (1711–1833), I will exam­ine the repro­duc­tion of “failed white­ness” in car­i­ca­ture from 1711–1833. Atlantic his­to­ri­ans and Crit­i­cal Race the­o­rists have iden­ti­fied white­ness as a crit­i­cal ele­ment for under­stand­ing eighteenth-century life. At the same time, car­i­ca­ture is under­stood as a rich cul­tural field for under­stand­ing the pol­i­tics and cul­ture of eigh­teenth cen­tury soci­ety. My dis­ser­ta­tion looks at how these two prac­tices, “white­ness” and “car­i­ca­ture,” informed each other. I explore the way Britons pro­moted prob­lem­atic white bod­ies and used car­i­ca­ture as a prac­ti­cal index for iden­ti­fy­ing how white bod­ies fail. Par­tic­u­larly, I exam­ine four case stud­ies of white­ness in car­i­ca­ture over a one hun­dred year period. First, I will exam­ine the graph­i­cal satire response to the South Sea Scheme and col­lapse (1711–1764), the Mac­a­roni series pub­lished by Mary and Matthew Darly (1768–1780), and the prob­lem­atic white rad­i­cal in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Era (1787–1804). Then I turn to an under­ex­plored set of prints by William Heath, who took advan­tage of the pop­u­lar­ity of the Hot­ten­tot Venus per­for­mances to reframe coali­tional pol­i­tics in Par­lia­ment as a form of dan­ger­ous mis­ce­gena­tion and a threat to the white body politic (1810–1833).

UPDATE: Here’s the thing with dis­ser­ta­tions, they change as you work on them. And for us “human­ists,” they can change A LOT. So below is what I thought I was work­ing on. I con­sid­ered that abstract clear as day when I wrote it, and now, I have lit­tle idea of what the hell I was talk­ing about. But I’m happy to leave it here, to show just how much think­ing, writ­ing, read­ing, and time clar­i­fies ideas. And it’s reas­sur­ing to see where I’ve been, I know I’m going in the right direction.

My dis­ser­ta­tion, “Is a Laugh Trea­son?” Car­i­ca­ture, Slav­ery, and Cit­i­zen­ship in the Age of Rev­o­lu­tion, con­sid­ers print cul­ture, specif­i­cally car­i­ca­ture, in the Atlantic World from 1760 to 1848. My work sit­u­ates the his­tory of eigh­teenth cen­tury car­i­ca­ture and cap­i­tal­ism as a his­tory of bod­ies in tran­sit, both lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively. The move­ment of lit­eral bod­ies in the slave trade cre­ated an increased mean­ing — as they cir­cu­lated as labor­ers, con­sumers, and com­modi­ties, they sig­ni­fied and trans­lated their social and polit­i­cal sta­tus in print. In this con­text, rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the body become vital to our under­stand­ing of the nascent mod­ern socio-political land­scape. An analy­sis of what I call “infor­ma­tion cap­i­tal” requires dis­cus­sion not only of the cir­cu­la­tion of eigh­teenth cen­tury printed mate­ri­als — such as Atlantic print pam­phlets, peri­od­i­cals, cor­re­spon­dences, and broad­sides — but also the process of meaning-making in per­son­hood and cit­i­zen­ship. As yet, a crit­i­cal race the­ory that exam­ines car­i­ca­ture and print cul­ture of the eigh­teenth cen­tury Atlantic remains under­de­vel­oped. My project is designed to fill that void and will explain how artis­tic pro­duc­tion and com­mer­cial cir­cu­la­tion of the printed word and image were cen­tral to dis­courses of racial hier­ar­chy and modes of resis­tance in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Atlantic World.

Q. Oh, so you’re an eigh­teenth cen­tury historian?

A. Not really — I’m a visual stud­ies scholar work­ing on a spe­cial­ized eigh­teenth cen­tury project.

Q. What is visual studies?

A. I often draw a blank when try­ing to explain visual stud­ies, so here’s a suc­cinct expla­na­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine:

Visual Stud­ies draws from a num­ber of dis­ci­plines to explore the mean­ings, prac­tices, and processes of look­ing and imag­ing across his­tor­i­cal peri­ods and diverse cul­tures. Visual Stud­ies is inclu­sive and broad-ranging both in its meth­ods and approaches and in its objects of inquiry, which include dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, pho­tog­ra­phy, film, paint­ing, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ries, tele­vi­sion, per­for­mance, sculp­ture, video, sound, the built envi­ron­ment, and pop­u­lar culture.

Q. So why blog?

A. Writ­ing, even good writ­ing, can only hold my atten­tion for up to 2,000 words before my mind begins to wan­der or life demands my atten­tion. This coin­cides with the num­ber of words I can type in one sit­ting with­out a break. My pre­vi­ous attempts at blog­ging degen­er­ated into sin­gle serv­ing entries of links and quotes with­out much, if any, nar­ra­tive or author-generated con­tent. The few times I did ven­ture into long form essays, I enjoyed the feed­back from my read­ers and mem­bers from the blog­ging com­mu­nity at large. So why did those blogs fail? Because they were anony­mous, plain and sim­ple. Not to say that anony­mous blog­ging doesn’t work for many authors and that a pseu­do­nym can grant an ele­ment of free­dom, but it sim­ply did not work for me. I want to par­tic­i­pate in the col­lab­o­ra­tive poten­tial of the web and I couldn’t do that with­out com­ing out of the shad­ows. I work best when I col­lab­o­rate and I sin­cerely hope that you’ll leave feed­back in the com­ments, it is in dia­logue where we all thrive best.

Q. I’m inter­ested in read­ing on, where do I go from here?

A. Awe­some! You can sub­scribe to my feed and/or fol­low me on twit­ter.
I hope you enjoy your stay.