African American Studies is excited to welcome our newest addition to the faculty, Assistant Professor Henry Washington Jr.! Professor Washington was previously an Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. We recently sat down with him to learn more about his work and ideas for his new role:
What does your research focus on?
My research interests are pretty wide-ranging, but everything I write shares a curiosity about how racial and sexual difference is manufactured by systems of oppressive power to service their aims, as well as how racial and sexual minorities relate to that manufacturing and contend with it in their artmaking.
In the book I am working on, I explore how the category of "the criminal" became synonymous with blackness through 19th century cultural and scientific discourse's habits of looking at the black female body. I am interested in how these habits of looking helped to alleviate the crisis of identity formation wrought by slavery's formal abolition, as well as how they were reimagined, and at times reiterated, by black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins as they attempted to assert their fitness for citizenship.
But I have carried my general interest in the production of difference and the ways minorities use expressive acts to contend with that production to a number of other archives as well. My first published article explored how black mothers of children slain by police have publicly staged acts of embodied care at and beyond the scene of death that problematize black people's historical vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence. My second article examined how FX's Pose attempts to intervene in the dominant narrative of trans-of-color life at the height of the AIDS pandemic through performance, even as these efforts are constrained by the show's evident desire for representative historical status. A third soon-to-be published article scrutinizes cultural and scholarly understandings of gospel music as about resilience and overcoming through an attention to its black women performers' gritty interpretive vocality.
Why African American Studies at UC Berkeley?
I became a scholar because I wanted to do black studies. Like many black folks in my generation both within and beyond the academy, the visibility of antiblack state terror provoked my ongoing path toward critical consciousness. My scholarly work has always been an effort to nurture that path—to better equip myself to understand, and ultimately intervene in, the habits of seeing that render antiblack violence so ordinary. I can hardly think of a department with a richer history of black study than this one, and I feel honored to join that tradition. Although I am clear about the fact that UCB is an institution, like any other, I am excited to be part of the vital and rigorous intellectual community African American Studies has managed to curate within that larger structure—a place where the kinds of questions that animate me are actually presumed legitimate.
What courses are you excited about teaching and creating?
This spring, I am excited to teach a graduate course called “Black Feminist Theories of the Human,” which will explore Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers’ interventions in black critical thought as well as the reverberations of their impact in black studies today. I am also excited to teach courses in the future on black queer and trans theory, African American literature and performance, data regimes and the epistemological foundations of social scientific inquiry, and black gospel music. One course I’d be excited to reimagine is “Race, Class, and Gender in the United States.” The course already sounds great, but I would love to expand its attention to expressive cultures as a lens through which to understand difference and how folks relate to it.
What projects/hobbies do you engage in outside of work?
I’m a major foodie, so I love trying out a new restaurant, bakery, or recipe at home. I also love live theatre, actually talented vocalists (so rare in the industry today), and reality television (the more lowbrow the better).
What song captures the start of this new academic year for you and why?
Brandy’s “Like This,” from her Full Moon album. Besides being one of my favorite records ever, it is an upbeat groove on an album full of ballads about heartbreak. I have in mind the fights for freedom in Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and Palestine. I have in mind graduate students' fight for a living wage and for the reasonable promise of a professional future in the academy. I am holding all of that even as I am excited about the possibilities of my new position; I feel energized to keep fighting.