Zakiyyah Jackson is an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University. A 2012 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Jackson has already made an impression in black feminist and queer theory. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies and Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. Jackson’s scholarship has been supported with a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research interests in literature, visual culture, performance, and “new ontologies” fits squarely within the 2015-16 theme of “Posthuman Futures.”

Her talk, which is a preview of her book-in-progress Life, Matter, Systems in an AntiBlack World, promises to bring cultural theory into closer conversation with the idea of posthumanism. Titled “The Blackness of Space Between Matter and Meaning,” Jackson’s lecture will interrogate the now common appeals for movement beyond “the human” in diverse scholarly domains. Contra the beguiling appeal of the “beyond,” Jackson will ask “What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond? Moreover, what is entailed in the very notion of a beyond?” Jackson will caution that appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race. Drawing on key figures in black feminism, queer studies, and Africana philosophy this talk will investigate the metaphysics of “the human” in order to explore the possibilities and limits of posthumanist, feminist new materialist, and object oriented approaches to ontology.