TAPS/English
The fall before I applied for my MFA, I became preoccupied, maddened. A journalistic series on a tiger hunt in India ascribed the “man-eater’s” “taste” for human flesh to Indians’ “eating ginger and other spices,” misrepresented its dwindling population as “burgeoning,” and was written by an American journalist who had parachuted into South Asia. Gleeful, flippant, orientalist—it felt much closer to 19th-century travel writing than what I hoped for contemporary journalism. This outrage informed my research on human and tiger sexualities, the economies of desire and dispossession, and the relationship between colonialism, conservation, and climate change.
In my current research, I study colonial-era hunting and travel memoirs, guides, and video as archives that are both representation and operation – as narratives that depict power while simultaneously instructing how to perform it. Colonial media stages this environmental theater, these ritualized performances of masculine domination over non-human life and colonized land(scape). I blend Marxist literary criticism, archival research, and creative practice in examining this media as a report of masculinity, spectacle, and ecological violence.
I write prose, screenplays, and other text objects, varying in hybridity and legibility. I like to write about identity, the non-human, labor, and postcolonial ecologies using various modes including lyricism and comedy. ORIENTAL CYBORG (February 2024), a collection of notes, jokes, and queries on race, automata/automation, and globalization, won Essay Press’s Chapbook Prize. 2024 also saw the award-winning festival run of my co-created comedy series PROBLEMATIC (BRIC TV), a satirical look at the outrage cycle machine that I was once part of as a hot take writer. Two dogs have me, and they make life worth living.