Through an examination of the Virgin Islands National Park (VINP), a conservation site on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the Caribbean, “Possessing Paradise: Conservation and Colonialism in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands” attempts to codify these strategies and introduce the concept of possessive conservation as a distinct branch of colonial conservation (conservation colonialism).

In “Without Bounds: Colonialism and Disaster in St. Vincent and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” Lauren Prince and I intervene in Caribbean environmental history from a contemporary vantage point to lay bare some of the persistent consequences of colonial histories of violence and their impact on disaster and disaster response. We begin by analysing hurricanes in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) to consider similarities between disasters across time. We then move to the island nation of St Vincent and the Grenadines to describe the impact of the 2021 La Soufrière volcanic eruption.

“Precarious Learners: Race, Status and the Making of Virgin Islands Education from 1917-1970” (2023) was written through the support of a Virginia Commonwealth University Publishing Research Award. In it, I discuss the early educational history of the U.S. Virgin Islands and its relationship to projects of American imperialism in the region.

“Jumbie Man” and “Like You Mommy” are two original poems published in the 36th edition of The Caribbean Writer: Disruptions, Disguises & Illuminations (2022).

“Conserving America’s Paradise: Where the Fight for Land and Learning Meet” (2021) is a book chapter in Distancing as Infinite Entanglement: Healing, Intersectionality and Interstices in the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Greater Caribbean and Beyond. It discusses a portion of my dissertation research on conservation colonialism’s impact on educational aims on the island of St. John.

“Disrupting Whiteness: Jonin’ and the Fugitivity of Black Speech in American Public Schools” (2021) examines the way speech projects among Black urban public school students belong to a genealogy of Black fugitivity and resistance.

“Politics of Nature: The Wait/Weight of Disaster in St. Vincent” (2021) is an autoethnographic appraisal of colonialism’s role in natural disasters and the way they can be mitigated.

“Human Fragility: The Condition We Fight to Escape” (2020) is a reflection on how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the disorders and fragility of of civil society as well as the racial and class dynamics inherent to crises.

This article (2021) is a review of Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. In it, I explore Cottom’s discussion of various aspects of the black female experience such as beauty, money, infant mortality, and sexual violence.

“Problems of Possession: The Colonial History of Eco-Tourism in the Virgin Islands” (2021) analyzes the history of the Virgin Islands National Park and its relationship to present-day issues of dispossession and cultural erasure.

“Place of No Escape” (2020) interrogates white tourists’ desire to escape the troubles endemic to racialized modernity only to find it reiterated and reproduced in “paradise.”

“Call It By Its Name” & “Unforgotten” (2013) are two original poems (and my first postgraduate publications!) that feature the themes of resistance, coloniality, and heritage.