New Books In Critical Theory

In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Imam Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the racial logics of the so-called “Enlightenment,” past and present. Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020) breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo (NOW-LO) Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae (La-Hi), and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that ha