Black Studies is a global discipline that engages the intersectional racialized, gendered, sexual, classed, religious, and linguistic identities of people of African descent across continents and time periods. Our faculty expertise transverses many important lines of inquiry in this complex interdiscipline, and coalesces around three subfields of particular importance to the field:

  • Black Queer and Trans Studies
  • Post/colonial & Black Political Economies;
  • Black Intellectual Traditions.

Black Queer and Trans Studies

Black Queer and Trans Studies is a dynamic field that emerged in the early 21st century at the intersection of Black Studies, Black Feminisms, Queer Studies, and Trans Studies. This interdisciplinary subfield seeks to understand and analyze the experiences, lives, and histories of Black queer and trans formations, politics, and aesthetics, challenging Eurocentric frameworks in queer theory and expanding conversations regarding the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality. Crucial social and political issues centered by Department scholarship include resistance to the New Right, anti-Black LGBTQ violence in the Americas, Black LGBT history and archives. Working in various historical periods and from various locations in the Diaspora, our Black Queer and Trans Studies faculty collectively instantiate how, why, and where “Black people have a significant stake in thinking about and theorizing the body in relation to self-definition, state regulation, and physical and social death.”

Recent Faculty Publications:

Candice Lyons, “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space.” Winner, 2020 Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award

Sabrina Strings, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

Roberto Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

Omise’eke Tinsley, The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival. Winner, 2023 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies

 

Post/Colonial & Black Political Economies

Black Studies faculty in this specialty highlight the continuous devaluation of Black lives through political-economic processes such as land grabbing, police killings, segregation, and Black premature death. A particularly relevant area of interest is Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Studies, as the region becomes an even more embattled geography of racial capitalism and Black resistance. Another crucial subtrend in the field is the re-emergence of studies focused on Black ecologies against racial capitalism and a growing interest in exploring ecological, environmental, and land crises in the black diaspora, historicizing and analyzing the disproportionate effects of global climate change and toxic stewardship on the region’s rural and urban landscapes.

Recent Faculty Publications

Christopher McAuley, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship

Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil

Black Intellectual Traditions

UCSB Black Studies faculty engage Black intellectual traditions in a transdisciplinary, transversal, and transhistorical fashion. Cedric Robinson—former Chair of Black Studies and groundbreaker in the study of the Black Radical Tradition—consistently denounced the structural denial that Black people are agents of knowledge production and argued that Black ontology is imperative to the development of the modern world. In recent years, our most senior scholars have also contended with reframing Black intellectual traditions through a reexamination of “great thinkers” and a scrutiny of the contribution of Black intellectuals to modern sociological thought. As they provincialize Western grand narratives, scholars of this tradition consider how Black ontology and Black aesthetics become platform for collective liberation.


Recent Faculty Publications and Projects


Ingrid Banks, “Intersectional blackness matters: Why family science should care about the College Board's A.P. African American Studies course controversy”
Keith Mayes, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education
Jeffrey Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. Winner, 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography