dr. m. shadee Malaklou’s scholarship intervenes in Enlightenment humanism’s racist metric of time, querying sex and gender as visual markers of historical-racial difference. She argues that race/ism is a historical cut enforced by the white gaze, and that the violence of its hailing also lives within, operating in/as/through our psychic-interiority. Her research finds that racial blackness is written into the historical record as the human’s antecedent and Other, made relevant only as the constant against which human (i.e., non-black) movements of arrival and “beyond” are measured. As the bush’s proper inhabitants, racially black persons exist — according to Enlightenment lore — in a time before (human) time, characterized by undifferentiated gender and unchecked sexuality. Malaklou’s intervention thus re-thinks cis-hetero patriarchy as a symptom of anti-black humanism, troubling understandings of intersectionality that do not attend to this particular nexus.
a trans-disciplinary scholar, Malaklou publishes in academic journals like Theory & Event, The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Rhizomes, Black Camera, National Political Science Review, Trans-Scripts, the Journal of critical animal studies, and online platforms like syndicate. Click on the icon above (“journal articles”) to learn more about Malaklou’s academic publications.
“Rather than have access to time as a moving marker…rather than have access to civilizational discourse, to a progress narrative, or to (his)story— even, to an alternative (his)story (or, to her-story)—the Black African is instead imagined in the canonical texts that define and respond Euro-Enlightenment humanism as forever stuck in time; specifically, in the bush—in a time before (human) time.”
Malaklou, M.S. (2021). Reaching Backwards in Time: The Feltness of Unfreedom in an Antiblack World. Theory & Event 24(2), 598-604. doi:10.1353/tae.2021.0029.
the black/trans/femme(inist) “moves not where she shouldn’t but when she shouldn’t, with a wilding imagination that is out of time, in no-time, in any time.
…Not an identity (arrival) but a praxis (departure), the black/trans/femme(inist) ‘turns/And…turns/And…turns,’ unfixing ‘all that we might place under the heading of time.’
…Her unsanctioned movements built this ‘time of the now,’ ‘danc[ing] the beginning of humanity and the genesis of creativity,’ and she’s ‘still fucking here,’ threading Man’s timeline, skipping rocks across the coordinates of his longue durée.”
Malaklou, M.S. (2023). dancing in dehiscence. Syndicate. “Symposium on Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism.”
other writings
Malaklou, M. S. (2022). Loving with bell, leaping with Fanon, and landing nowhere. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 30(2), 66-77.
Malaklou, M. S. (2021). Surviving the Ends of Man: On the animal and/as black gaze in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 18(2), 70–99.
Malaklou, M. S. (2018). 'Dilemmas' of Coalition and the Chronopolitics of Man: Towards an Insurgent Black Feminine Otherwise. Theory & Event, 21(1), 215–258.
public scholarship
Malaklou is known for her think pieces on topics ranging from Beyoncé and Jay-z, to Trayvon Martin, to DAPL and its relationship to the movement for black life, to the sports-media complex’s exploitation of black flesh, and more. Her public scholarship can be found in The Feminist Wire, Counterpunch, The Conversationalist, and other platforms, and in podcast and media interviews. Click on the image (“the revolution will not be humanized”) to learn more about Malaklou’s public scholarship.
