Questionnaire

European artistic practices, focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, and the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline.Rather than assume the redemptive power of art, I have increasingly turned away from art history and toward black studies in order to explore the constitutive (yet often unthought) relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the transatlantic world.Cast in this light, my work can be broadly understood as what early modern theatre historian Nomie Ndiaye would call reparanoid, which is to say, "grounded simultaneously in a reparative desire to account for Afro-diasporic life that exceeds the painful heinousness of racial formations, and in a paranoid distrust of the comfort and complacency that accounts of black life can easily elicit among twenty-first-century readers prepared for any number of reasons to minimize the transhistorical reality of antiblackness." 1 My third monograph, Thinking the Unthought: From Continental Theory to Black Radical Study, extends and complicates this methodological orientation.The book traces how black radical study as developed at the University of California, Berkeley-particularly during my formative years there as a graduate student at the turn of the last millennium-at once extends, revises, and ultimately undoes the theoretical frameworks and ethical horizons of Frankfurt School and French poststructuralist theory, with far-reaching implications for longstanding art-historical protocols as well as for the means and methods of the humanities writ large.The volume is thus conceived as an intellectual autobiography, critical primer, historiographic corrective, and polemical claim for the indispensability of African/ Diasporic thought in light of the transnational hierarchy of race that relentlessly situates black(ened) fem(me) beings at the bottom of a given heap.Each chapter is organized around one of six contemporary thinkers, all of whom attended or taught at UC Berkeley: