Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Biographic Data
| ID | 416299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zakiyyah Iman Jackson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zakiyyah Iman |
| FAMILY NAME | Jackson |
| SIGNATURE | JACKSON Z I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 306 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image
Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstract…
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower
On Becoming Human: An Introduction
Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring
On Becoming Human: An Introduction
In order to facilitate a fuller appreciation of the conceptions of ontology identified in Becoming Human, I pose three arguments that fundamentally reframe the animalization of blackness. First, I argue that philosophers’ and historians’ emphasis on antiblack formulations of African reason and history have overlooked the centrality of gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness. Namely, I argue that black female flesh persi…
Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde
This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and …
Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde
Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative has been central to interpretations that read African American literature through the framework of a petition for human recognition. Douglass, arguably the nineteenth century’s most iconic slave, grounds his critique of slavery in natural law. However, his later speeches problematize his commitment to the natural rights tradition by disrupting its racially exclusive conception of being and challenging the anima…
“Not Our Own” Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
“Not Our Own”: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
Chapter 3 begins an inquiry into the constitutive role of antiblackness for the logics of scientific taxonomical species hierarchies. The chapter identifies the agentic capaciousness of embodied somatic processes and investigates how matter’s efficacies register social inscription. The chapter also provides a reading of risk, sex, and embodiment in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a text that affirms the continued importance of risk for establishin…
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower
The coda closes Becoming Human with a consideration of recent developments in the biological sciences and biotechnology that have turned their attention to narrating the problem of “racial health disparity” in reproductive health. I suggest that work on the epigenome, mostly housed in the regulatory sciences—epidemiology and public health—possesses contradictory potential and thus uncertain possibilities with respect to (dis)articulating the anti…
Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring
Chapter 2 is a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s 1999 Locus Award–winning near-future novel Brown Girl in the Ring. Becoming Human avers that gendered antiblack metaphysics continues to subtend scales of world among humans, animals, and objects in Martin Heidegger’s still highly influential thought, despite being imagined as a corrective to previous scales, such as the scalae nauturae or the Great Chain of Being examined in chapter 1. It explores what …
Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that B lackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and p…
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
In *Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World*, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that dominant theories of the human are rooted in antiblackness. Jackson traces how Enlightenment thinkers and key figures in psychoanalysis and phenomenology established a conceptual framework that positions Blackness as the antithesis of humanness. By examining a range of cultural productions, including literature, film, and performance art, Jackson demo…
Theorizing in a Void
This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discer…
Losing Manhood
Research Article| December 01 2016 Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2016) 25 (1-2): 95–136. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.25.1-2.0095 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Per…
Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms
Research Article| June 01 2015 Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms José Esteban Muñoz; José Esteban Muñoz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jinthana Haritaworn; Jinthana Haritaworn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Myra Hird; Myra Hird Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jasbir K…
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism ZakiyyahImanJackson In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order ... only one ... has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance ... was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared... one can cer tainly wager that man would be…
Waking Nightmares-on David Marriott
My essay is a meditation on David Marriott's corpus of writing. It attempts to foreground some of the implications of his work for the future direction of queer theory, feminism, and scholarly attention to race. In making a demand on our thinking and sensibilities, his contribution asks us to bear witness to past and ghostly forms of violence that seek to fix blackness as the ultimate signifier of unassimilable difference
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
In *Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World*, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that dominant theories of the human are rooted in antiblackness. Jackson traces how Enlightenment thinkers and key figures in psychoanalysis and phenomenology established a conceptual framework that positions Blackness as the antithesis of humanness. By examining a range of cultural productions, including literature, film, and performance art, Jackson demo…
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism ZakiyyahImanJackson In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order ... only one ... has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance ... was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared... one can cer tainly wager that man would be…
Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms
Research Article| June 01 2015 Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms José Esteban Muñoz; José Esteban Muñoz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jinthana Haritaworn; Jinthana Haritaworn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Myra Hird; Myra Hird Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jasbir K…
Theorizing in a Void
This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discer…
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that B lackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and p…
Waking Nightmares-on David Marriott
My essay is a meditation on David Marriott's corpus of writing. It attempts to foreground some of the implications of his work for the future direction of queer theory, feminism, and scholarly attention to race. In making a demand on our thinking and sensibilities, his contribution asks us to bear witness to past and ghostly forms of violence that seek to fix blackness as the ultimate signifier of unassimilable difference
Waking Nightmares-on David Marriott
My essay is a meditation on David Marriott's corpus of writing. It attempts to foreground some of the implications of his work for the future direction of queer theory, feminism, and scholarly attention to race. In making a demand on our thinking and sensibilities, his contribution asks us to bear witness to past and ghostly forms of violence that seek to fix blackness as the ultimate signifier of unassimilable difference
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism ZakiyyahImanJackson In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order ... only one ... has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance ... was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared... one can cer tainly wager that man would be…
Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms
Research Article| June 01 2015 Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms José Esteban Muñoz; José Esteban Muñoz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jinthana Haritaworn; Jinthana Haritaworn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Myra Hird; Myra Hird Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jasbir K…
Losing Manhood
Research Article| December 01 2016 Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2016) 25 (1-2): 95–136. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.25.1-2.0095 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Per…
Theorizing in a Void
This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discer…
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower
On Becoming Human: An Introduction
Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring
On Becoming Human: An Introduction
In order to facilitate a fuller appreciation of the conceptions of ontology identified in Becoming Human, I pose three arguments that fundamentally reframe the animalization of blackness. First, I argue that philosophers’ and historians’ emphasis on antiblack formulations of African reason and history have overlooked the centrality of gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness. Namely, I argue that black female flesh persi…
Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde
This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and …
Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde
Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative has been central to interpretations that read African American literature through the framework of a petition for human recognition. Douglass, arguably the nineteenth century’s most iconic slave, grounds his critique of slavery in natural law. However, his later speeches problematize his commitment to the natural rights tradition by disrupting its racially exclusive conception of being and challenging the anima…
“Not Our Own” Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
“Not Our Own”: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
Chapter 3 begins an inquiry into the constitutive role of antiblackness for the logics of scientific taxonomical species hierarchies. The chapter identifies the agentic capaciousness of embodied somatic processes and investigates how matter’s efficacies register social inscription. The chapter also provides a reading of risk, sex, and embodiment in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a text that affirms the continued importance of risk for establishin…
Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower
The coda closes Becoming Human with a consideration of recent developments in the biological sciences and biotechnology that have turned their attention to narrating the problem of “racial health disparity” in reproductive health. I suggest that work on the epigenome, mostly housed in the regulatory sciences—epidemiology and public health—possesses contradictory potential and thus uncertain possibilities with respect to (dis)articulating the anti…
Sense of Things: Empiricism and World in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring
Chapter 2 is a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s 1999 Locus Award–winning near-future novel Brown Girl in the Ring. Becoming Human avers that gendered antiblack metaphysics continues to subtend scales of world among humans, animals, and objects in Martin Heidegger’s still highly influential thought, despite being imagined as a corrective to previous scales, such as the scalae nauturae or the Great Chain of Being examined in chapter 1. It explores what …
Losing Manhood: Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that B lackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and p…
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
In *Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World*, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that dominant theories of the human are rooted in antiblackness. Jackson traces how Enlightenment thinkers and key figures in psychoanalysis and phenomenology established a conceptual framework that positions Blackness as the antithesis of humanness. By examining a range of cultural productions, including literature, film, and performance art, Jackson demo…
Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image
Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstract…
Art (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Biology (4 works)