I’m a cultural anthropologist with varied interests, ranging from the politics of sexual,
environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with
shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. My
first book monograph is entitled, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-
Making in Neoliberal Ghana , and published by the University of California Press. The book is
an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate
men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, I draw on African philosophy,
African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso
navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in
neoliberal Ghana.

My ongoing ethnographic project investigates the vitality of the queerness of waste in general,
and electronic waste, in particular, focusing on a community of e-waste workers whose lives, I
argue, archive the multitudinous afterlives of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. I
suggest that the non-normative character of waste belies heteronormative conceptions of
“life”—the period that supposedly precedes waste. In this ethnography, I bring my interests
in African and African diasporic queer studies to bear on my burgeoning interests in
environmental sustainability issues in Ghana, global climate change, and their impacts on
African and African-descended bodies. I engage with the less recognized interdisciplinary
field of African Science to examine the global politics of e-waste in particular, and the
undulations of global climate change, in general. These crucial considerations are made in the
new monograph, The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, in which I
ponder Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition. There, I explore
the racialization of Africa and Africans in literal and figurative readings of “waste,” privileging
a community of waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. In doing so, I
explain how e-waste workers’ lives echo those histories of displacement that animate
dispossession, extraction, and deposition. I use the term “toxic citizenship” to both index
how these workers get exposed to toxins, and to underscore how the histories of slavery and
colonization engender conditions for toxic selfhoods in neoliberal and neo-capitalist worlds.
Turning to interventions by the likes of Walter Rodney, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Gloria
Emeagwali, D.A. Masolo, C.C. Mavhunga, Cedric Robinson, Patricia McFadden etc., I read
waste as an archive that illuminates the continued exploitation of Black bodies and interrogate
the ways in which racial capitalism masks African technological and scientific innovations. I
am particularly interested in how “waste” or “refuse” provides an epistemology for advancing
African Science not only as a science that “refuses” but a science of “refusal.”

In addition to the above projects, I am working on a personal project, a memoir that
documents my upbringing as queer Ghanaian man in a traditional Presbyterian family in
urban Ghana. Called In my Mother’s House, the memoir, which is part epistolary and part
autobiographical, documents the erosion of my once intimate relationship with my mother.