R. A. Judy

  • Professor

R.A.'s Affiliations: boundary 2, Center for African Studies, Islamicate Studies Working Group.

R. A. Judy studied at al-Azhar University and holds degrees in Islamic philosophy, and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota. R.A. is a member of the six-person Editorship of boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture. The journal has published recent special issues critically engaging important topic, including Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right, as well as a Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity. He is also a member of the Editorial Collective of CriticalProductive, a journal dedicated to the intellectual project of culture, arts and architecture, and on the Advisory Board of liquid blackness, an on-line journal that seeks to carve out a dedicated place for aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies to come together in productive ways; as well as on the Editorial Advisory board of Comparative Literature Studies.

Representative Publications

He is author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992), and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020). He has published numerous essays in the areas of philosophy, contemporary Islamic philosophy, critical theory, Arabic and American literatures.

Among some of his more prominent publications are: “The Question of Nigga Authenticity,” “Kant and the Negro,” “Dreaming About the Singularity of the New Middle Ages: Three Provisional Notes on the Question of Imagination,” Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al- wāqi‘ī, or New Realist Science,” “Some Thoughts on Naguib Mahfouz in the Spirit of Secular Criticism,” “The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness,” “Restless Flying, A Black Study of Revolutionary Humanism,” and “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience.” Among the important volumes of boundary 2 he has edited are: The Tunisia Dossier (2012), Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years (2003), Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dynamic Thinking (2001), Reasoning and the Logic of Things Global (1999), and Scattered Speculations on Value: Exchange Between Etienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, and Gayatri Spivak (1999).

Research Interests

Poetic socialities, black study, Arabic and African philosophy, Islamicate thought, semiotics and critical theory