Jasmine Wallace
Education
Professional Bio
Areas of specialization
Critical philosophy of race
Social and political philosophy
Black feminist and queer theory
Recent Publications
"Living Histories of Black Embodiment," in Southwest Philosophy Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2024): 47-55
"Conceptually Misaligned: Black Being, the Human, and Fungibility," in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 7 (2023): 333-344.
Current Projects
I'm currently working on my first book project, Phenomenology of Black Gesture. This project emphasizes instances of uninhibited expressions of Black life that unfold in loopholes of retreat—temporary spaces of reprieve from the direct surveillance of the racializing gaze. My book intervenes in scholarship in Critical Philosophy of Race and Decolonial theory to argue that the larger task of overthrowing humanism in order to achieve emancipation for all who fall outside of the category Human is already occurring in fugitive spaces, like queer ballroom, where Black people can experience an uninhibited embodied intentionality. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied intentionality is essential in this work because it reveals meaning and, what I refer to as ‘ontological presence’, in expressions of embodiment like gestures. I amend Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘habit body’ to distinguish between a ‘routinized habit body’ (e.g., playing an instrument) and a ‘robust habit body’ from which novel habits can emerge. I argue that gestures such as vogueing in queer ballroom and the Black Nod emerge from the Black uninhibited embodied intentionality drawing from the sedimentation of habits in new ways—i.e., robust habit bodies acting in spontaneous and creative manners productive of meaning.
Research Interests
I’m trained in Continental philosophy, at the intersection of Critical Philosophy of Race, Critical Phenomenology, Queer Theory, Decolonial Theory, Black Studies, and Africana Studies. The primary aim of my research is to historicize our understanding of anti-Black violence, white supremacy, and the corresponding changes this has had for Black subjects from chattel slavery through the present. My scholarship balances the need to historicize and, thus, accurately describe Black lived experience under white supremacy and analyze Black life that isn’t reducible to trauma, suffering, and violence by theorizing Black lived experience when the body schema is not ‘on guard’ before the racializing gaze.
