My research explores cultural production in the conjuncture of decolonization and its afterlives. The histories of European empires are not spatially, culturally, politically, or linguistically hermetic. My work proposes that the overlaps between them, and the connections between those who resisted them, can help us re-imagine the spatial and aesthetic co-ordinates of culture and politics in literary and cultural studies. Not only did anticolonial writing and art remake the world, but it can help us, today, to contest and re-order the fixed coordinates of colonial, nationalist and post-imperial spatial imaginaries.

I have written widely about the connections between poetics and politics in the conjuncture of decolonization. In 'Stepping out of line in independent Conakry', I analyse aesthetics of dissent in 1960s Conakry. My article 'Reading the radio-magazine: culture, decolonization and the PAIGC’s Rádio Libertação' examines the multilingual ‘radio magazine’ as one inheritor of mid-century journal networks. My first monograph, Articulated anticolonialism : literary journals and African decolonization, analyses the transnational geographies of literary journals that connected francophone, lusophone and anglophone anticolonial writers in the 1950s and 1960s. The book considers the particularity of the literary journal as a literary form and traces the history of changing anticolonial ideas about the stakes of writing, reading and translation.

With Dr. Musab Younis at Queen Mary University of London, I am guest-editing a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly entitled 'Southern Questions: Theory at Europe’s Colonial Frontiers'.

As a 'BBC New Generation thinker', I have made a number of radio programmes drawing on my research, for example 'Colonial Papers' and 'I arrive without leaving – the story of women surrealist poets'.  I have also published broadly in long-form literary and political journalism, for instance in The London Review of Books, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Dissent Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement. I am also a translator of poetry and prose from French and Portuguese into English.