Project Abstract
My current project concerns what I am thinking of as jailbreaking race: that is, not the “post-racial” but a method to think and live in ways that allow for radically otherwise possibilities for our inhabitation of the world, of ourselves, and with one another; for committing to a deeply radical modality of living that cannot abide vestiges of hegemony and coloniality, race included. I aim in my project, then, to engage abolitionist theory, critical theory, and black studies—as well as trans studies, my other intellectual and scholarly expertise—to articulate a way of thinking about subjectivity and, specifically race, in excess of such a designation. Not to its exclusion but its excess, which is to say, paraphrasing someone like Hortense Spillers, going through race to get to something wider.
So, I plan to convene a gathering of three or four thinkers, both academic and non-academic, for a two-day session in which we would engage in dialogue. This would not simply be a paper delivered by these thinkers with a Q & A to follow, but a more engaged, deeper dialogue: that is, they share their thoughts surrounding race, its coloniality, abolition, and the philosophical and critical theoretical ways we might think in excess of it, and then a respondent sits down with them and discusses its implications and applications. The point is to engender an ongoing and sustained thinking-out-loud.
Investigator
Marquis Bey
Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and English, and core faculty in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns the intersections of blackness and nonnormative gender, abolition, and philosophy. More specifically, they are a transfeminist theorist of race and gender. Marquis has authored, most recently, the monograph Black Trans Feminism and the essay collection Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published with Duke University Press in 2022. Currently, they are working on a three-volume collection of critical essays entitled “Jailbreaking,” in which they bring an abolitionist lens to the categories of gender, race, and class. Find more about their work at their website, marquisbey.com.