Zakiyyah I. Jackson, Associate Professor of Literature

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

Blackness and Globality; Experimental Forms in Literature, Moving Image, Art, and Thought; Theories of Literature, Visuality, and Perception; Media Studies; Science and Technology Studies of Biology, Medicine, and Computation; Continental Philosophy; Contemporary Critical Theories; Aesthetics; Gender and Sexuality Studies

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.  

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.

Contact Info:

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Web Page:	http://zakiyyahimanjackson.com

Teaching (Spring 2026):

• LIT 390S-4.01, SP TOP IN FILM Synopsis

  Friedl Bdg 102, MW 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as AAAS 390S.01, CINE 390S.01, ENGLISH 390S-6.01, ROMST 390S.01, VMS 390S.01)

• LIT 690S.03, SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE Synopsis

  Friedl Bdg 225, M 10:05 AM-12:35 PM

  (also cross-listed as AAAS 690S.03, GSF 690S.03, ICS 590S.03)

Keywords:

Art History • Cinema Studies • Continental philosophy • Critical theory • Gender History and Theory • History of sexuality • Literature • New media art • Race • Science and Technology Studies

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Jackson, ZI, Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image, Topia, vol. 46 (March, 2023), pp. 134-147 [doi]  [abs]
2. Jackson, ZI, “Theorizing in a Void”: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics, in Transgender Studies Reader Remix (January, 2022), pp. 120-131 [doi]  [abs]
3. Jackson, ZI, Ontologized Plasticity, in More Posthuman Glossary (January, 2022), pp. 89-91
4. Jackson, ZI, "Theorizing in a void": Sublimity, matter, and physics in black feminist poetics, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117 no. 3 (July, 2018), pp. 617-648 [doi]
5. Jackson, ZI, Losing Manhood, Qui Parle, vol. 25 no. 1-2 (December, 2016), pp. 95-136, Duke University Press [doi]