Cherod Johnson’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century African American literature, film, and photography of the U.S. and the Caribbean; theories of race, pornography and sadomasochism, and the african diaspora; and the intersections of law, personhood, and finance capitalism. The questions that sustain Cherod’s scholarship emerge from an abiding interest in queer theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies.
Cherod is interested in queer articulations of blackness in African American literature and visual cultures, and how sociopolitical claims of personhood and rights discourse are initiated and especially worked out through iterations of anti-blackness.
Previously, Cherod’s scholarship has focused on the ways in which the black body troubles traditional understandings of the archive, memory, and subjectivity, and how the grammar of the black body may potentially call out for a public reckoning.
