Zakiyyah I. Jackson, Associate Professor of Literature

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of Theory in the Department of Literature at Duke University. She 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 Award in LGBT Studies.

Jackson’s research examines how black diasporic literature, moving image, and visual art engage—and transform—the historical concerns, epistemologies, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Her work reveals the disavowed literary and aesthetic dimensions of these disciplines while clarifying the constitutive role of antiblackness in their metaphysical frameworks. She approaches black diasporic speculative and experimental practices as modes of theory and philosophy in their own right and investigates their formal strategies for what they afford in (dis)ordering the reigning operations of perception, sense, and thought. Jackson’s research situates and critically interrogates authoritative conceptualizations of being and existence, demonstrating that literature and visual art—as well as their study—play a vital role in shaping philosophy and scientific thought.

Jackson’s work has appeared in journals including Feminist Studies, e-flux, GLQ, Qui Parle, South Atlantic Quarterly, e-flux, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Her articles are available at zakiyyahimanjackson.com.

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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]