Contributors
Daniel Colucciello Barber is a Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and On Diaspora (Cascade, 2011). His current research is on the critique of conversion.
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and African-American Studies at Yale University. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University. She was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her forthcoming book, a recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, examines the performative disassembly of the black body in contemporary art. Bradley was the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and Black Camera: An International Film Journal.
Sabine Broeck teaches English-Speaking Cultures and Transnational/Transcultural Studies at the University of Bremen. Her research critiques the coloniality and anti-Blackness of transatlantic modernity as a social formation and culture of enslavism. She was president of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) from 2007 to 2015, and director of the University of Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) until 2015. She has published two monographs, Der entkolonisierte Koerper (1988) and White Amnesia-Black Memory? American Women's Writing and History (1999). Recently she edited, with Stella Bolaki, Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press 2015), as well as, with Jason Ambroise, Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, (Liverpool University Press 2015). She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled "Against Gender. Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism," contracted with SUNY Press. For more information visit her website.
Andy Campbell is an independent art historian, curator, and critic. With over a decade of experience in higher education and museums, Campbell's scholarly and curatorial work considers the juncture of queer + feminist political movements alongside their attendant visual cultures, critically reflecting on art's histories. Currently, he is Critic-In-Residence with the Core Program (MFAH/Glassell). He will be curating the first US mid-career retrospective of Dean Sameshima's queer photo-conceptual works for She Works Flexible Gallery in Houston, Texas. Entitled Public Sex, the show opens in April.
Theodora Danylevich is a doctoral candidate in American literature and culture in the English department at the George Washington University. She is presently completing her dissertation, which theorizes femininity as a parasitic and pathological epistemology both exercised by and located in oppressed and stigmatized "reproductive flesh" in American modernity. In addition to this publication, she has an article on grief and self-harm under review for a special issue on diagnosis with The Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. She is also an archives processor with the DC Africana Archives Project.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs remembers and creates ceremonies of connection that move through black life and black death. She has a PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry appears in many publications including Best American Experimental Fiction, ElevenEleven, Vinyl, Rattle and more. Alexis is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016).
Dalton Anthony Jones is an Associate Professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University where he teaches courses in black studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, American culture studies and peace and conflict studies. He holds a BA in literature from Brooklyn College, as well as an M.A., M.Phil. and joint Ph.D. in American studies and African American studies from Yale University. An avid photographer, his work engages the field of visual culture and his images have appeared in several group and solo exhibitions. He loves his children, Vedan Kaisha and Nomad Zephyr, dearly and hopes that his work will, in some small way, contribute to the cause of social justice.
M. Shadee Malaklou is a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation repurposes Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks to rethink the planetary alignment of race, sex and gender, using coded representations of Iranian sexualities as a case in point.
David Marriott teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent collections of poetry include In Neuter (Equipage, forthcoming 2013) and The Bloods (Shearsman Books, 2011). A new critical book, Whither Fanon? is forthcoming from Stanford University Press, 2016.
Qiana Mestrich is a photographer and writer. She states, "Through still photography my work exposes hidden or denied histories, giving visibility to stories shaped by immigration, assimilation and the perceived failures of multiculturalism. I work primarily within documentary photography but have also employed archival photographs, texts and found digital imagery to create conceptual, constructed pieces. My practice is research driven and I often use my own personal/family history as a place of reference because it is both what I know best and what I know little of. Driven by the Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness by which I was raised, I make work because I don't believe in coincidence. Always seeking to uncover seemingly tenuous connections, I believe the photographic image has the power to relate the personal with the universal." More at qianamestrich.com.
Jared Sexton teaches African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism.
Christina Sharpe is associate professor of English, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Tufts University. She is the author of two books: Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, Fall 2016). She is currently working on two projects provisionally titled Thinking Juxtapositionally and Refusing Necrotopia.
Sara-Maria Sorentino is a Ph.D. candidate in the Culture & Theory program at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation examines slavery as an organizing principle for early modern discourses.
Selamawit Terrefe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently completing her dissertation, a comparative project concerning the US and Africa, entitled “Dissociative States: The Metaphysics of Blackness and the Psychic Afterlife of Slavery.” Her project investigates and engages the psychic, phenomenological, and metaphysical terrain initiated in the works of theorists of black life, and black death, meditating within the vastly under-theorized space and state of the psychic afterlife of slavery.
Parisa Vaziri is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. Her work explores legacies of African slavery in the Indian Ocean World, and the aesthetic, historiographical and anthropological forms in which such legacies have been memorialized or forgotten. She is interested in the way that the fading memory and forgetting of slavery's history in the Indian Ocean world contrasts with slavery's monumentalized history and ongoing presence and persistence in the Atlantic world; the details of such contrasts, she believes, have implications for a global theory of racial blackness and of race.
Amber West is a poet and theater-maker originally from California. Her writing has appeared in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry & Material Performance, Calyx, The Feminist Wire, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, Daughter Eraser, was recently published by Finishing Line Press and The Word Works will publish her first full-length poetry collection, Hen & God, in 2017. She is co-founder of the artist collective, Alphabet Arts, and director of the Puppets & Poets festival in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her PhD in English at University of Connecticut and her MFA in Poetry at New York University. More at amberiwest.com.
Frank B. Wilderson III is an award-winning writer, activist, and critical theorist who spent five and a half years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans who have held an elected office in the African National Congress during the country's transition from apartheid. He also worked clandestinely as a member of the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). He has worked as a dramaturge for Lincoln Center Theater and the Market Theater in Johannesburg. He is the recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; The Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers; and The American Book Award as well as other literary awards and honors. His books include Incognegro (Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010).
Jaye Austin Williams is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University, Long Beach. A director, playwright, actor, teacher, writer, consultant and public speaker, her work has appeared on and off Broadway and regionally for more than thirty years. She has received numerous fellowships and commissions, including the University of California, Irvine Chancellor's ADVANCE Postdoctoral Fellowship; the NEA/TCG Career Development Program Fellowship for Directors; the Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship at Manhattan Theatre Club; a commission from the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, and outstanding achievement recognition from the Kennedy Center All College Theatre Festival. She holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theatre from the joint doctoral program at the University of California Irvine and San Diego; an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; and a B.S. in Theatre from Skidmore College. Her chapter, "On the Table, Crumbs of Freedom and Fugitivity: A 21st century (re) reading of Crumbs from the Table of Joy," will be published in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage, Jocelyn L. Buckner, Ed. (Routledge, 2016).