Peer Reviewed Publications
Racial Recursivity as Critical Race Game Studies Methodology
Proceedings for Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2026 (forthcoming)
This article is interested in theorizing repetition as foundational to the videogame medium and as a technique deeply influenced by race thinking. Seeking to build a critical race studies methodology that bridges formalist and cultural approaches to game studies, the article explores how a videogame’s various structures function as interconnected systems through which videogames communicate meaning via repetition such as core gameplay loops, narrative patterns, and visual design. Drawing parallels between how games generate meaning through repetitive play and how racial formations are naturalized through repeated cultural practices, the article offers racial recursivity as a methodology for critical race game studies while demonstrating that formalist analysis and critical race studies are not oppositional but complementary tools for understanding how race operates in videogames and culture writ-large. The article applies this critical race studies methodology to the videogame BioShock, showing how the game’s upgrade mechanics, narrative design, intertextual reference, and architectural design are all informed by racial ideas, which are, in turn, naturalized through repetition within both the game and across culture. By refusing the false binary between formalism and cultural critique, this article establishes the theoretical groundwork for analyzing how game mechanics, aesthetics, and narratives work recursively to reinforce racial logics.
Black Video Games as New African American Novel
Cambridge History of the African American Novel (CHAAN), Cambridge University Press, Fall 2027, (accepted).
This chapter argues that African American video game developers are engaged in a project I term Black Digital Worldbuilding. This concept extends upon recent scholarly attention to worldmaking in African American literature, such as Kevin Quashie’s call to recognize the “aliveness” of Black literary texts, by examining how Black game designers curate interactive digital worlds where players follow the perspective of Black characters while experiencing the totality of these characters’ lives. If one of the traditional strengths of the novel is its ability to capture the interiority of the subject, the African American video game offers a dual project of embodied interiority for the Black player character, while also experiencing the effects of living as a Black person in these digital worlds. Through this practice of Black Digital Worldbuilding, African American video games emerge as a new novel form for the participatory moment of the digital age. Crucially, this practice runs counter to the dominant ideologies encoded into much of gaming culture, a culture that often prizes hegemonic white masculinity. Given that Black game designers have been systemically marginalized at major gaming studios, it is unsurprising that their innovation is primarily happening in the indie video game space—that is, video games produced by individuals or small teams without the financial backing of a major publisher. While queer indie game developers have received some scholarly attention (Bo Ruberg: 2019), comparatively little work has addressed the political intervention of Black indie game designers, a gap this chapter seeks to address.
Bloodborne: Japanese Folk Horror
Horror Videogames: A Companion, Peter Lang, Spring 2027, (accepted).
FromSoftware’s Bloodborne is predominantly seen as inspired by Victorian Gothic and Lovecraftian horror. While these are undoubtedly central touchstones for the game, this dominant narrative overlooks the centrality of Japanese folk horror for Bloodborne. Despite the rich tradition of the monstrous and the supernatural in Japanese culture and spiritual practice, Japanese videogames—particularly those with Western settings—are often imagined as Western videogames by any other name. Following Japanese game studies which asks scholars to recognize the cultural specificity of Japanese videogames (Whaley, Hutchinson, Consalvo), this chapter seeks to examine the particularity of Japanese horror videogames. Using Bloodborne as a case study, this chapter shows how the game’s horror aesthetics are enmeshed in a longer Japanese folk horror tradition, particularly yōkai and the grotesque. For instance, several enemies correspond to different yōkai such as the Witch of Hemwick resembling the Yamauba and the Fishmen recalling the Kappa. Further, while Bloodborne is undoubtedly influenced by Lovecraftian horror, the distorted bodies featured throughout the game are also an example of the grotesque, which is a common feature of Japanese setsuwa literature (Li) and interwar Japanese pulp fiction (Driscoll). Through culturally specific analysis, this chapter broadens our understanding of horror in Japanese videogames.
"The Bad Guy is Capitalism" - Notes on Dimension 20’s Interstitial Camp
with DA Hall, Analog Game Studies, Fall 2026, (under review)
We offer an extended analysis of a popular Actual Play show that is both punk and camp: Dimension 20 (D20). Across multiple seasons of the show, we demonstrate how the show’s camp approach to genre enables a radical and fundamentally popular political critique. By occupying mainstream, recognizable genre conventions and then humorously subverting them, D20 attempts to reveal and widen “cracks” in the facade of capitalist realism. We take this term from John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism, which he develops as the basic site and activity of interstitial resistance movements, in order to articulate D20’s popular anti-capitalist practice. After examining the historical and theoretical origins of such a project, the article presents case studies of three of the show’s premier seasons. Within the show’s debut season of Fantasy High, we examine the use of the “bit”–short, comedic utterances–as a foundational element of D20’s campy genre play that enables the show's theoretical and political commitments. The subsequent analysis of Unsleeping City demonstrates that the season follows through on those commitments by translating them into pragmatics on the streets of New York City and highlighting the role of community. The article concludes by reflecting on Neverafter as a meta-aesthetic statement on the function and limits of D20’s interstitial, popular project in the context of the broader Dropout production company.
The Weary Blues as Mediation on Black Networks
Langston Hughes Review, Winter 2026, (accepted).
I apply network theory to Langston Hughes’s 1926 debut poetry collection The Weary Blues to examine it as a poetry collection fundamentally concerned with Black networks. The Weary Blues functions as an extended meditation on the structural impediments to crafting and maintaining Black communal networks, yet these networks prove provisional, resilient, and occasionally ruptured. Each section of the poetry collection explores different attempts to connect nodes within a Black diasporic network around various thematic centers. The “Weary Blues” section examines jazz and cabaret culture as sites of Black communal performance networks, while “Water-Front Streets” explores transoceanic crossings and maritime life as foundations for global Black belonging. Further, in poems like “Negro,” Hughes reveals how a shared experience of cultural mourning became the very foundations upon which Black networks are built and sustained. Though these networks face constant pressure from structural inequities and anti-Black racism that threaten to dissolve the connections Hughes maps, they persist in transformed and adaptive forms. The collection becomes a meditation on the continual challenge of maintaining Black networks within a system designed to destroy them—networks that endure not through permanence but through their capacity for regeneration and reinvention.
Theorizing Homebrew: White Geek Masculinity and Homebrewing (Counter)Practice in D&D
Transformative Works and Culture, special issue on Gaming Fan Practices, guest edited by Hayley McCullough and Ashley P. Jones, special issue, no. 47. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2026.2915.
Homebrewing is a long-standing practice in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. It is necessary to situate homebrewing within broader formations of white geek masculinity and explore how homebrew practices serve as both participatory critique and hegemonic consolidation of larger social practices in TTRPG culture. This article situates homebrewing as a dual act of fan-led creative participation and ideological negotiation around the racial, class, and gender assumptions embedded within gaming communities through a case study of homebrewing in D&D 5E. It begins by tracing the historical lineage of TTRPG homebrewing to earlier hobbyist practices, particularly the Homebrew Computer Club, to reveal its sociohistorical foundations that privilege suburban white male upper-middle-class subjectivity. The article then offers a brief overview of the history of D&D homebrewing before using data scraping to examine homebrewing in Dungeon and Dragon magazines as well as in D&D-focused subreddits. Based on this research, the article develops a taxonomy of contemporary homebrew practices and examines the varied receptions these practices elicit, ranging from purist backlash against homebrew to praise for the ability of homebrew to challenge problematic value sets in the D&D rules. Finally, it turns to fan reception of Aabria Iyengar’s work as a Dungeon Master (DM) in four seasons of Dimension 20 as a case study to highlight the expectations around homebrewing in Actual Play fandom, which I argue can offer potential insights into views around homebrewing in the larger TTRPG culture.
HBCU Writing Centers Confronting the “Canonized Corpus” in LLMs
with Paola Yuli, Sabrina Bramwell, and Alexandra Omogbadegun. Writing Centers and AI: Generating Early Conversations, March 2026, https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2026.2791.2.23
In this chapter in an edited collection about writing centers and generative AI, we define the “canonized corpus” as a legacy of the literary canon by using some hands-on research with Chat-GPT and Claude.AI to show how these LLMs uphold a “canonized corpus” of celebrated literary texts at the experience of writers of color and women writers. We then turn to the substantive role that writing centers can and do play in addressing the use of LLMs by students. Next, we look at the unique role of HBCU writing centers and argue they are well-positioned as thought leaders contending with LLM use in higher education. Finally, we offer 4 sample scenarios for how writing center coaches can ethically work with students when using LLMs while helping students refuse the “canonized corpus.”
Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne
Victorians and Video Games, edited by Lin Young and Brooke Cameron, Routledge, October 2025. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003498995-19/blood-blackness-fromsoftware-bloodborne-austin-anderson.
Bloodborne, FromSoftware’s 2015 action role-playing game, is a critically acclaimed title that merges Lovecraftian cosmic horror with Victorian gothic aesthetics. The celebrated game explores a world transformed by the consumption of mysterious Old Blood, which turns inhabitants into monstrous creatures. This chapter argues Bloodborne engages with deeper historical narratives of scientific racism and nineteenth-century anxieties about blood and miscegenation. Drawing from HP Lovecraft’s literary works and the late-Victorian scientific landscape, Bloodborne unconsciously reflects the period’s racist discourses about biological differences and blood purity. By examining the game’s narrative through the lens of nineteenth-century scientific racism, this analysis reveals how unintentional racial ideologies can be embedded within contemporary popular media, specifically highlighting the subtle ways racist historical narratives continue to haunt current cultural expressions through a process the chapter calls “racial recursivity.”
Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Videogame
Electronic Book Review (EBR), 28 September 2025. https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/dark-souls-as-networked-hyperlinked-videogame/.
This article introduces the concept of the networked hyperlinked videogame through a case study of Dark Souls. The networked hyperlinked videogame is a videogame whose ludic-textual structures (e.g., mechanical difficulty, gameplay systems, narrative presentation, etc.) encourage player-led digital exploration (via paratextual materials like wikis, lore videos, and online walk-throughs) while simultaneously curating a networked community both within and beyond the game world. By applying the videogame formalism methodology to Dark Souls, I argue that the game’s various ludic-textual structures defamiliarize videogame play and thus encourage players to seek clarification in external digital paratextual materials such as wikis, walkthroughs, and lore videos. Drawing on hypertext theory, I view these actions as a practice of hyperlinking. Through this practice, the game cultivates an ecosystem of network exploration that spans both the game’s in-game asynchronous multiplayer elements (e.g., message system and bloodstains), in-game synchronous multiplayer elements (e.g., summoning and invasions), and external out-of-game materials (e.g., the Fextralife Wiki and Vatividya lore videos). Through these systems, Dark Souls encourages community engagement to comprehend Dark Souls and work for refamiliarization. The networked hyperlinked videogame is therefore a type of videogame—exemplified by Dark Souls but not necessarily exclusive to it—that encourages community creation through the specific response it produces from players.
Fear of Black Europe: Race in Medieval and Early Modern Video Games
KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, July 2025, pp. 1-16, https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.252.
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Video games set in or inspired by early modern or medieval Europe have historically featured almost entirely white casts of characters, a decision often defended on the grounds of historical accuracy. This video essay examines how the myth of an all-white European past emerged and how it has shaped both video game design and gaming culture more broadly. It then explores how diversity is represented in the For Honor and Chivalry series as case studies of the "historical accuracy" framing in video games. Ultimately, the essay argues that including a diverse cast of characters is not only appropriate but necessary for achieving true historical accuracy.
Manufacturing Consent to Whiteness in Game Studies
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, vol. 17, March 2025, pp. 17-38. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00113_1.
This article examines how game studies and the gaming industry collaborate to manufacture consent to whiteness, fostering a gamic grammar that normalizes whiteness as the default subjectivity in gaming. It begins by contextualizing gamic grammar against the backdrop of Gamergate 2.0, highlighting how this cultural moment reinforces long-standing exclusionary practices in video game culture. The article then critiques the early celebration of the ‘magic circle’ in game studies and argues that it helped codify whiteness as foundational to the discipline. Video game design is subsequently analysed as a process that conceals its ideological apparatus, and it argues that video games are helpful interlocutors for exploring the ‘manufacture of consent’. Drawing on the concept of ‘manufacturing consent’, this article contends that the collective apparatus of game studies and the gaming industry positions whiteness as the exemplary implied gamer and reifies a racialized hierarchy within gaming culture. Using the critical literature of The Stanley Parable as a case study, the article critiques how analyses of subjectivity and agency in game studies frequently overlook the racialized and gendered dimensions embedded in a game’s design. Finally, by foregrounding race in The Stanley Parable, the article not only disrupts this collective consent to whiteness but also advocates for a reimagined game studies that centres the racial, gendered and sociopolitical categories shaping video games and their broader cultural impact.
Whiteness in English Studies and Why HBCUs Cannot Fix the Field’s Diversity Problem
ADE Bulletin, vol. 161, September 2024, pp. 60-73. https://doi.org/10.1632/ssqy6539.
There is a justifiable culture of anxiety among humanities graduate students and recent graduates because of the many uncertainties regarding the future of our fields. This anxiety is supported by data from the National Science Foundation’s 2020 Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED). The 2020 SED report and Jessica Taylor’s corresponding analysis in this issue of the bulletin reveal the many challenges facing our discipline and reflect the precarious position in which new and soon-to-be PhD recipients find themselves. Particularly concerning is the pervasive lack of racial diversity in English programs, which is the focus of my response to Taylor’s piece. I begin with a discussion of persistent whiteness within English studies, then look at the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard to end affirmative action, and I examine how this decision may make it more difficult to diversify English PhD programs. I conclude by turning to the role of HBCUs in diversifying English and literary studies, wherein I argue that HBCUs cannot, and should not, be expected to fix the lack of racial diversity in the field; rather, our discipline must provide more institutional support for HBCUs and other minority-¬serving institutions (MSIs).
Blackening the Frame: Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr
Popular Culture Review: Black Popular Culture in America Special Issue, vol. 34., no 2, Summer 2023, pp. 3-42. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2831-865X.2023.tb00797.x.
This article looks at Kerry James Marshall's comic series Rythm Mastr and argues Marshall is “blackening the frame” with his African-centric, Yoruba-influenced comic series. Rythm Mastr—like much of his artistic work—is “blackening” because the series is Marshall’s corrective to the overwhelming whiteness of canonical comics and the silencing and erasure of Africans in Western popular culture writ large. It is a “blackening” of white Eurocentric political hegemony, which in the words of Hall, “is these days waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else” (257). “The frame” invokes three referents: the “frame” around a singular scene in a comic, the “frame” of paintings in an art museum, and the way that Black subjects have been historically “framed” by non-Black artists and writers. By “blackening the frame,” Marshall uses the medium of comics within the art museum to explore Black history and reframe American popular culture towards an African-oriented future. Marshall’s incorporation of Yoruba figures within the superhero genre allows him to base his story within African mythology rather than European cultural icons. “Blackening the frame” is part of a larger discourse where Black cartoonists respond to “muted blackness,” which Qiana Whitted suggests is “transnational racial discourses” in canonical non-Black authored comics that “have historically marked and muted blackness” (79). Marshall, like the Black cartoonists that Whitted considers, responds to and rejects “muted blackness” to restore the agency of the Black subject. The decidedly African-influenced Rythm Mastr is part of a broader insurgence among Black comic creators like Kwanza Osajyefo that are unapologetically demanding a central place within comics while refusing to capitulate to market demands to include Western, i.e., white, referents.
“Aquatic Knowledge for Those Who Know”: Drexciya as Black
Cultural Praxis
Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film, edited by Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, May 2023, pp. 16-30. https://cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-0210-9/
This chapter looks at the Drexciya myth, invented by the Detroit House due of the same name, that posits a Black Atlantis called Drexciya that is populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off the slave ships during the Middle Passage. I would like to suggest Drexciya as a creative praxis of Black hydropoetics that turns to the undersea as a liberatory space for people of the African diaspora. Through the act of aquatic submergence, Drexciya and the Black Atlantis provide a praxis for interpreting Black cultural production that engages with the underwater space as a site of potentiality and belonging as opposed to one of enslavement and death. I suggest Drexciya may be positioned as a way of reading Black hydropoetics for Black liberation and creative possibility. Drexciya posits that Black people have a uniquely kindred relationship with the undersea that fostered the creation of a Black utopia entirely outside of hegemonic white supremacy and capitalist modernity. The Drexciyans mutated into the more-than-human and subsequently surpassed land-confined humanity in technological innovation, nautical abilities, and ethics. Drexciya is part of a larger Black radical tradition—which Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery note, “has always been engaged with the undersea” (35)—that is submarine. I examine three very different texts: Nikky Finney's 2003 poem "The Undersea World o f Jacques Cousteau," Michelle Cliff's 1984 novel Abeng, and Lupe Fiasco's "Wave" from his 2018 album Drogas Wave. I have chosen these works because they are examples of African diasporic texts that engage with the exciting potentials of the underwater space for Black community and belonging. Throughout, I argue that land-based poetics and ethics are not enough to combat systematic racial discrimination and the traumatic history perpetuated by our climate of anti-Blackness. For this reason, creatively descending into the undersea space provides an opportunity t o find racial justice.
Literary Alibi: The Consumption of African American and Dalit Literatures
The Comparatist, Comparative Racism Special Issue, vol. 46, Oct. 2022, pp. 134-155. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/com.2022.0008.
Alibi is “a claim that one was elsewhere when an act, typically a criminal one, is alleged to have taken place.” I argue many White people participate in a system of innocence by association where they use their familiarity with literature created by people of color to proclaim their own racial innocence—a phenomenon I call Literary Alibi. African American writers have seen extraordinary and deserved acclaim, but structural racism remains. Dalits in India occupy a similar social position. Aniket Jaaware elucidates the dangers of conflating literary revolution with social revolution in his work on Dalit literature when he writes, “we could always eat the Dalit by consuming his speech, thus satisfying our so easily satisfiable conscience” (287). Using Jaaware as a springboard, I argue that a comparison between African American and Dalit literature is not only valid but necessary by examining the rich history between African American and Dalit literature. I foreground my concept of Literary Alibi in a comparative analysis of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues and Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha—representative poetry collection of the African American and Dalit literary canons. In particular, I focus on how both poets resist simple metonymic readings by using modernist poetic techniques such as shifting perspectives, heteroglossia, dialectic, and free verse. In doing so, Hughes and Dhasal resist false intimacy and reject Literary Alibi by refusing to “offer an excuse” for their White or upper-caste readers. I conclude by arguing that we must foreswear Literary Alibi and embrace measurable legislative action to address race and caste injustice.
“He must have caught a stray bullet”: Police Brutality in The Walking Dead (comics)
ASAP/Review, 18 October 2021, https://asapjournal.com/feature/he-must-have-caught-a-stray-bullet-police-brutality-in-the-walking-dead-austin-anderson/.
Though best known for being the inspiration of the long-running and award-winning AMC television adaptation of the same name, The Walking Dead comics were wildly successful during their original run from Oct. 8, 2003 to Jul. 3, 2019. The Walking Dead Volume 1 Days Gone Bye, which collects the first 6 issues of the comics drawn and shaded by Tony Moore, was the best-selling graphic novel of the 2010s. Despite being one of the most successful comics of the twenty-first century, literary critics have largely ignored Kirkman’s magnum opus. The handful of critics who do investigate the series have almost entirely overlooked the use of policing and police imagery in the comics. This is all the more striking when we consider Rick Grimes—the heliocentric protagonist of which the world orbits—is a former police officer who deliberately and consciously uses his policing past to vault to a leadership position in a variety of communities. By interrogating Kirkman’s depiction of policing, it becomes clear that The Walking Dead negotiates the racially rooted trust and suspicion of the police in American culture and, more importantly, reveals how pro-police narratives told through the white gaze actively ignore testimony from Black citizens victimized by the police. This article looks at the representations of police in the comic series The Walking Dead and argues The Walking Dead negotiates the racially rooted trust and suspicion of the police in American culture and, more importantly, reveals how pro-police narratives told through the white gaze actively ignore testimony from Black citizens victimized by the police.