Bio:
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies. Her scholarship attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production and to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. She is working on a book-length project that examines literature and performance to explore the ways black folks manage racial terror through a sense of humor endowed with black feminist affects like curiosity or a sense of political legitimacy imagined to be possible even among morally, materially, and politically opposing figures.
Other research investigates contemporary black aesthetic categories, practices, and values within presumably avant-garde cultural production and within everyday collective culture-making. In particular, she is interested in the socio-political anxieties, problems, and presumptions that power these values and features.
Recent collaborative projects also include a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns as well as a co-edited double-volume anthology entitled Abolition Feminisms (Haymarket Books).