Zakiyyah Jackson
“I find that black women and works of art often occupy similar positions in critical discourse, as the object of someone else's theory, as objectified by theory, or worse, as a muse. I want to provide a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises and implication of these forms and traditions.”
“Brilliantly reframes the relation between blackened life and the category of human, by shifting the terms of the debate.”
“The sheer beauty, force, and ingenuity of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s aesthetic strategies and gestures are on display as she performs the very risks and rewards she conjure.”
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World: winner of the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies and is featured in Art Forum magazine's “Best of 2021” issue. Her research explores the literary and figurative aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is at work on a second book, tentatively titled “Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender.” The project provides a critique of biocentrism (or biological reductionism and determinism) and elucidates the indistinction of sex/gender and race. It argues that antiblackness constitutes the bedrock of modern Western logics of sex/gender, in science and philosophy, and meditates on the transfiguring potentialities of blackness. Jackson’s work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Feminist Studies, e-flux, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience in addition to exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. She has work forthcoming in Diacritics.
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