Henry Washington Jr.

Henry Washington, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the founder and convener of the Black Critical Theory Initiative. His research broadly explores how dominant constructions of cultural difference help justify the persistence of antiblackness in the era of inclusion, as well as how black cultural forms attempt to contest these constructions and produce more complex truths about Humanness. He is at work on his first book project, Looking to Be Included: Black Political Desire and the Culture of the Criminal, which surfaces the messy, intramural politics of imag(in)ing at issue in how turn-of-the-twentieth-century black arts and letters contended with the cultural-scientific “truth” claims of black criminality that threatened black people’s pursuit of recognition as fully human and civic subjects. In so doing, the project highlights a central paradox of black postbellum existence: modern institutional power at once incorporates black bodies and conscripts black imaginative capacities, constraining the horizons of political possibility realizable in black aesthetic and intellectual traditions. He is also developing a second book project, which traces how gospel musicians use performance to politicize the forms of black suffering routinely silenced in religious expression and in the antiblack world more broadly. His writing appears in the peer-reviewed journals Women & Performance,Camera Obscura, and Literature and Theology; the edited keyword collection Thinking from Black: A Lexicon; and the exhibition catalog for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s New Time: Art & Feminisms in the 21st Century

Washington earned his B.A. in English and African & African American Studies from Duke University, and his M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University. At Stanford, he co-founded the Black Studies Collective, and received both the Outstanding Mentoring and Teaching Award from the Department of African & African American Studies and the Middlebrook Teaching Prize from the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University.