Black Video Games as New African American Novel, Cambridge History of the African American Novel (CHAAN), Cambridge UP, Spring 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.[1] 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. 

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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. 

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The Weary Blues as Mediation on Black Networks, Langston Hughes Review, 2027, (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.

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Theorizing Homebrew: White Geek Masculinity and Homebrewing (Counter)Practice in D&D, Transformative Works and Culture, Gaming Fandoms, Special Issue on Fan Practices, Mar. 2026, (forthcoming).

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. Through an analysis of homebrewing in Dungeons and Dragon magazines, online Reddit communities, and in reception to Aabria Iyengar’s Dimension 20 seasons, it is possible to create a taxonomy of homebrewing across TTRPG culture.

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Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, Victorians and Video Games, edited by Lin Young and Brooke Cameron, Routledge, October 2025. https://www.routledge.com/Victorians-and-Videogames/.

In this upcoming book chapter, I look at the HP Lovecraft-inspired 2015 video game,  Bloodborne. It is my suggestion that Bloodborne is unintentionally informed by racist discourses around blood and blood mixing that emerged in the 19th-century and subsequently influenced Lovecraft’s racism and writings. Further, Bloodborne’s recursive gameplay loop—the constant returning of enemies no matter how many times you slay them—unintentionally highlights how racist narratives, such as those of biological blood, continue to haunt contemporary popular culture such as video games. ​

 

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 applies a videogame formalism methodology to Dark Souls and argues that the game's various ludic-textual structures challenge player expectations, encouraging them to engage with the game's multiplayer systems and explore fan-made paratextual materials. By defining the player's movement between these structures as an act of hyperlinking which creates a networked community, I identify these as key characteristics of what I call the 'networked hyperlinked videogame'.

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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.

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.

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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.

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The Persistent Lack of Racial Diversity in English Studies, ADE Bulletin, vol. 161, September 2024, pp. 60-73. https://doi.org/10.1632/ssqy6539.

There is a justifiable culture of anxiety among humanities gradu­ ate 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 analy­ sis 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 per­ sis­ tent 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).

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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.

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“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.

 

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.  

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“He must have caught a stray bullet”: Police Brutality in The Walking Dead, ASAP/Review, 18 October 2021, https://asapjournal.com/feature/he-must-have-caught-a-stray-bullet-police-brutality-in-the-walking-dead-austin-anderson/.

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.

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