Education
Biography
James Bliss holds a PhD in Culture and Theory with an emphasis in Critical Theory. His first book, “In a Field of Static,” traces key moments in the histories of critical theory and cultural studies as missed encounters with Black feminism. The book examines the stories field formations tell about themselves, and the racial and sexual politics of debates and interventions that changed how we think about culture and power in the present: the theory wars, the debate between queer negativity and queer futurity, the emergence of transnational and diasporic feminisms, and the debate between intersectionality studies and assemblage theory. Black feminism is frequently both central to and absent from the defining moments in the development of these fields. The book makes the case for new readings of these field formations that make possible new theorizations of critique, relationality, belonging, and subjectivity in an antiblack world.
He is also at work on projects about anarchism, failure, & invention and Black feminism and the critique of violence.
Selected Publications
James Bliss. 2022. ‘Black Feminism and the Violence of the Word,’ in The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities, Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto, eds. Routledge.
James Bliss. 2021. ‘Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies.’Feminist Studies, Special Issue: ‘Black Feminist Thought,’ 47.1: 34-61.
Brittnay Proctor and James Bliss. 2020. ‘“It’s Not as Easy as It Looks on the Page”: Black Feminist Classics Against the Promise of Security,’ Feminist Formations, Special Issue: ‘Teaching the Feminist “Classics” Now,’ 32.1: 1-28.
James Bliss. 2019. ‘Arranging Flowers.’ Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Special Issue, ‘Black Pleasures/Black Death,’ 8.2: 1-9.
James Bliss. 2016. ‘Black Feminism Out of Place.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.4: 727-49.
James Bliss. 2015. ‘Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Special Issue, ‘Queer/Affect,’ 48.1: 83-98.