Little, Mahaliah. “Being Toward Trauma: Theorizing Post-Violence Sexuality.” Rejoinder: Special Issue – Trauma, vol. 7, no. 1, 2022.

“These questions gesture toward a more capacious theorization of Black women’s identity and sexual subjectivity in the aftermath of sexual violence—their post-violence sexuality. Imagining Black women’s sexual subjectivity after rape is more than a theoretical exercise when the threat of sexual violence is omnipresent and timeless. When Black women are included in popular discussions of life after sexual violence, what generative tensions escape us when reproductions of familiar “redemption after rape” tropes prevail?[1] …Grappling with the aftereffects of sexual violence as a spectrum of possibility is the work of imagining and theorizing comprehensive post-violence sexuality.”

Fair, Freda L. and Mahaliah A. Little. “Erotic Illegibility and Desire in Representations of Black Sexuality –  Erotic Representation in Underground.” American Quarterly, vol. 71 no. 1, 2019, p. 151-159.

“Freda and I share an investment in representation: in the ways that fiction and critical speculation can accomplish what seems comparably inaccessible, unattainable, or insurmountable to stark empiricism’s naked eye. To consider the question of ephemeral intimacy and erotic encounters among enslaved subjects, speculation rather ironically emerges as the most practical means of analysis.”

Little, Mahaliah A. “Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: Review.” Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 137–140.

“Sharpe situates contemporary arguments in deep historical sediment and deftly demonstrates the past’s proximity to our modern present. She ruminates on the ungreivablility of Black suffering and death, writing that “. . . the disaster of the Holocaust is available as human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their aftermaths are not” (p. 34). She temporally recasts Black suffering, and her questions and the deep consideration their answers would suggest that

the past is written in ink that still threatens to smear if swiped.”

Little, Mahaliah A. “Why Don’t We Love These Hoes?: Black Women, Popular Culture, and the Contemporary Hoe Archetype.” Black Female Sexualities. Ed. Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton. New Brunswick: Rutgers New Brunswick, 2015. 89-99.

“The hoe has evolved into a monstrous figure: a rogue, modern-day embodiment of Eve who is conniving and self-indulgent. It is precisely because of these implications of the term that—regardless of the action or reason that leads someone to label a black woman a hoe—it is assumed that she is a type of sexual deviant, even if that assumption is not explicitly acknowledged… Given the contradictory nature of the beliefs and assumptions about what a hoe is and what sort of debauchery hoes are considered capable of, they occupy a precarious position of being both admired and scorned in contemporary black society.”