Research

Politics and Poetry

I write about politics and poetry for Tribune and other magazines. My piece on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dread Dialectics (2021) was published by Jacobin, and for Tribune I have written on Russian Formalism and the language of Lenin (2021), and on the work of Jackie Wang, Dreaming Is Free (2022).

I have written an ongoing series of papers and articles on race, literature and Marxism.

I presented a seminar on Race and Poetry at University of Kent in 2017. An article in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry entitled Writing Race Under Capital: Nisha Ramayya, Nat Raha, and Daljit Nagra’s ‘Ramayana’ is forthcoming in 2020.

I focused on translation, the idea of mixed race poetics and bilingual poetry in a talk entitled The Cover That Uncovers: mixed-race poetics at the RAPAPUK: Legacies of Colonialism conference in Cambridge in 2018. Listen to an audio recording of the paper.

In October 2019, I gave a seminar at Cambridge English Faculty on Marxist conceptions of poetry’s political potential entitled Art’s Emancipatory Promise Commodified But Also Recast. Listen to a recording of the talk. The talk considers art’s commodification and political potential, considering some recent critical views of art in a time of crisis. Four critical themes or re-castings of art’s political potential are surveyed: Romanticism; Sabotage and Real Abstraction; Speculation Now; Fanon and counter language.

Parasitic Buildings. I am interested in the parasitic urban spaces created by capitalism and property. In particular how these play out in contemporary London. In parallel, in my films I also try to follow glimpses of a built world which has never materialised, as seen through a negative image. I presented a talk on the parasitic spaces of South London at the South of the River conference at the University of Greenwich in 2018.

Social Housing Worlds. I also research the changing worlds refracted within the design, signage and lives lived in social housing estates. In 2016, I presented some of this research under the title ‘Bristol Politics and Housing’ at the Changing Landscapes event at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. I wrote an essay on the Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights estate and its Forest Hill surroundings for the edited book ‘Mount London‘ (Penned in the Margins, 2014).

Developing the frameworks I used in the experimental work of philology, Complex Crosses, I am currently researching radical readings of the Book of Job, as well as close readings of Japanese poetry.

I delivered a seminar paper on the politics of philology: ‘Four Counterparts: Philology and Contemporary Poetry’ at the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Seminar series organised by Royal Holloway (2016).