Valerie Fryer-Davis

Student Fellow

Valerie Fryer-Davis (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her specialty is in decolonial, trans, and Black literature and theory, with an emphasis on Subsaharan Africa and the Caribbean. She has published in Memory Studies on the renegotiation of memorialization after the Rwandan Genocide and has also recently published a digest on queer pedagogy for the Hostos WAC Reader. She has work forthcoming in an edited collection on Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme, published by Africa World Press, that values silence and hope in the fight against environmental colonialism in the Niger Delta region. Her current research for her dissertation focuses on how trans and Black love and rage can redress queer and racial violence since the 1960s, with a specific focus on Africana literature and politics.




Participating Years


2024–2025

Anti-Capitalist Environmentalism

The existential problems of the planet are complex. Given capitalism’s obsessive growth primed by, for instance, land-grabbing, extractivism, social and economic hierarchies, and war, capitalist environmentalism leans heavily on tweaking armageddon to maintain its hold on futurity for the planet.