Losing Manhood

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of Theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.

Contemporary and Experimental African Diasporic Literature, Art, and Film; History and Philosophy of Science, Medicine, Computational Technologies and Digital Media; Continental Philosophy; Contemporary Critical Theories; Aesthetics; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Disability Studies; Ecologies of Race

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, and the Lambda Literary Book Award for LGBTQ Studies. Jackson's research investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy, revealing the disavowed literary and aesthetic projects of science and philosophy and clarifying the fundamental function of antiblackness in their metaphysics. In doing so, the African diasporic speculative and experimental practices featured in her work are regarded as modalities of theory and philosophy and their formal strategies investigated for what they make available for (dis)ordering the reigning operations of perception, sense, and thought. By reading Western philosophy and science through the lens of heterogeneous African diasporic speculative and experimental practices, Jackson's research situates and problematizes troubling yet authoritative conceptualizations of being and existence, demonstrating that literary studies—and African diasporic literary and visual artistic studies in particular— have an important role to play in the histories of science and philosophy.  Professor Jackson is currently at work on a book: “Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender.”

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 Venice Architecture Biennale, Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum of Harlem, White Chapel Gallery, among others. Jackson’s articles can be found at zakiyyahimanjackson.com.