Kirk is currently working on Africa and African Diaspora literatures and cultural production at the intersections of postcolonial discourses on humanity and human rights. Within the Anglophone and Francophone Atlantic world, Kirk's project attempts to uncover the routes of TransAtlantic traffic, both the movement of human beings and the trajectories of discourses about humans and human rights. Related to this, he also interrogates the transition between modernism and postmodernism as epistemological categories and their role in categorizing peoples vis-a-vis the nation, and other spaces of representational hegemony. Race and language politics become important markers in Kirk's project as it interrogates postcolonial cultural production in terms of minor transnationalisms and the place of the human in globalization discourse.