Zay Dale

My primary research reimagines depictions of violence in twentieth-century Black literature that responds to, and works with and against, the aesthetic violence of modernism and the avant-garde. My current book project entitled Black Radical Aesthetics of Literary Violence 1896-1956, situated between two seminal landmark cases, investigates Black literature from 1896-1956 to examine how representations of violence engage in the radical possibilities of Black becoming and un/belonging. My work seeks to advance theories of Black radical aesthetics by studying how Black writers utilize aesthetic violence as a form of worldmaking. Divided into two main sections, “In Black Skin” (chapters one-three) and “On Black Flesh” (chapters four-six), I engage with Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of Black skin and Hortense Spillers’ theory of Black metaphysical flesh. Drawing from Fanon and Spillers, I theorize violence not just as a force exerted on the body but as a practice that repositions Blackness as a space of resistance, transformation, and possibility. I study Blackness as not only a surface upon which terror was physically marked but as a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of Being might be reimagined.

My second book project, Fiber to Flesh: Textiles and Black Existence in American Slave Narratives, studies the representation of textiles, particular clothes, in slave narratives where I understand textiles as a weaponized mode of Black authority that the enslaved engineered to distort our understanding of the human by way of who can drape their body and who cannot. You can find my work in The Comparatist, Humanities, Eugene O’Neill Review, ASAP/J, Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis, and in an upcoming podcast interview on textiles and slave narratives in (Un)Box the Soap Podcast. At KU, I teach courses on Black Literature, Modernism, and British Literature.