Amber Jamilla Musser
Amber Jamilla Musser is an Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics, race, gender, and sexuality studies. Dr. Musser has also published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. She is the author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York University Press, 2018), which received a 2018 Arts Writer’s Grant from the Warhol Foundation, and Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York University Press, 2014). She also coedited, along with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social, a special issue of ASAP/Journal (May 2017). Currently, she is beginning a project on noise, ethics, and aesthetics. She also writes art reviews for Brooklyn Rail.
Selamawit D. Terrefe
Selamawit D. Terrefe is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at Tulane University, where she also holds affiliations with the Africana Studies Program and Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Before coming to Tulane, Terrefe was a postdoctoral fellow in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany, in the department of English-Speaking Cultures. She has presented internationally at workshops at the Tate Modern in London, the Max Plank Institute in Goettingen, Germany, and Rhodes University in South Africa, and has publications in The Feminist Wire, Theory and Event, Rhizomes, and forthcoming in Critical Philosophy of Race. She is currently completing her manuscript, Impossible Blackness: Violence and the Psychic Life of Slavery, which analyzes the fantasies harnessed to elaborate antiblack racial violence into narratives of possibility. As a critical theorist and scholar of Global Black Studies, her goal is to foreground the vibrancy of Black aesthetics without reinscribing a chimeric value to the political import of Black radical intellectual and social life. Attending to the intersections between race and gender, popular culture and fantasy, and violence and desire, she deploys multidisciplinary interventions to generate alternative paradigms of thought regarding race, sex, gender, the Black intramural, and revolutionary politics.