My academic writing examines how African life narratives – whether through written text, image, or performance – contend with the political and aesthetic legacies of empire. The pieces collected here reflect my commitment to analyzing how subjects in African and diasporic contexts use memoir, photography, archival practice, and exhibitions to shape their own forms of visibility. Across articles, chapters, and public-facing essays, I trace how these narratives unsettle received histories, reorganize the terms through which African lives are read, and open alternative ways of thinking about memory, representation, and self-making. This section showcases work that advances those arguments in different registers while remaining grounded in the same set of questions about how people insist on being seen and understood on their own terms.
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Sam Dennis 