BOOK PROJECT:

I am currently working on my first monograph Come Out of This World: Antiblackness, Criminalization and the Collaging of Precious Life. It is an ethnography with a central visual collage component that 1) analyzes the co-constitutive projects of racialization, criminalization, and statecraft in contemporary Trinidad that perpetuate black death and 2) speculates on a radical alterity where all life is cared for. Using ethnographic fieldwork contextualized through archival analysis, this monograph details the production and management of the figure of the “gang murderer” in Trinidad to show how it is used to legitimize the Creole respectable nation even as it menacing presence jeopardizes the nation-state’s stability. As this monograph reveals the ways anti-black violence undergirds black sovereignty, interrogates how the popular moral framing of violent crime legitimizes and masks this phenomenon, and visualizes how an otherwise can be imagined and remade from existing archives of violence it will contribute to scholarship in anthropology, Africana studies, visual studies, and political and legal philosophy.
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RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

 2024. "On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization and Black Womanhood in Trinidad." Cultural Anthropology 39 (1): 37–63. 

2022. " To Be Black Is to . . . : The Production of Blackness in and beyond Trinidad."Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (2): 108–118.

2021. Welcome, Leniqueca A, and Deborah A. Thomas. “Abstraction, Witnessing, and Repair: or, How Multimodal Research Can Destabilize the Coloniality of the Gaze.” Multimodality & Society 1(3): 391-406.
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2020. “The Infrastructures of Liberation at the End of the World: A Reflection on Disaster in the Caribbean.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 24 (2): 96–109.