About:

Barnor Hesse is a political and critical theorist concerned with decolonial questions of colonial-racial modernity, the western political, and Black politics in the lives, conceptualizations and formations of the Black Diaspora. He is an Associate Professor of Black Studies, Political Science and Sociology. He obtained his PhD in Government (Ideology and Discourse Analysis) from the University of Essex (United Kingdom).

Research Interests:

Black Political Thought
Political Theory
Black Critical Theory
Critical Race Studies
Black Affect Studies
Decolonial Studies
Black Conceptual Methodologies

Courses:

Graduate

BLK_ST 475: Genealogy of Race and Racism as Concepts
BLK_ST 401: Black Conceptual Methodologies
BLK_ST 480: Affect and Blackness
BLK_ST 480: Decolonial Black Political Thought 

Undergraduate

BLK_ST 380: Black Political Thought
BLK_ST 380: Feeling in Black Music: Black Affect Studies
BLK_ST 339: Unsettling Whiteness
BLK_ST 375: Post-Colonial Black Studies
BLK_ST 363: Racism in Western Modernity

Recent Publications:

‘Citations of Black Political Thought: The Black Constitutive Outside’ (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2025).

‘Derrida’s Black Accent: Decolonial Deconstruction’, in ReOrient: Critical Muslim Studies, Autumn 2023, Vol 8, No.1, pp 4-33

‘Black Populism’, in ‘2020: One Pandemic, Two Pandemics, Black Lives Matter’, co-edited with Debra Thompson, South Atlantic Quarterly, July 2022, No 121: 3

‘Introduction: Dispatches from Black Political Thought’ (co-authored with Debra Thompson) in ‘2020: One Pandemic, Two Pandemics, Black Lives Matter’, co-edited with Debra Thompson, South Atlantic Quarterly, July 2022, No 121: 3

‘Two Concepts of White Sovereignty’ in Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara and Antonia Majaca eds), ‘Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War’, Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt/Sternberg Press, 2021

‘White Populism: The Constitutive Outside of Blackness’, appendix in Santiago Castro-Gomez, ‘Critique of Latin American Reason’, Cornell University Press, 2021

He welcomes PhD enquiries from students interested in:

1.Black Political Thought and Blackness within and across the Black Diaspora.

2.Histories and formations of contemporary conceptions of race, racism and anti-racism.

3.Colonialisms and Decolonialisms in Western Modernity.

4.Black Critical Theory and problems and possibilities of critique, analysis and explanation.