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Assistant Professor
African-American Studies
Film and Media Studies
jcsexton@uci.edu

Prior to his appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies, Professor Sexton was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. He is guided in his work by the elaboration of a "new cultural politics of difference" in the field of African American Studies, a productive crisis which includes not only the critique of essentialism but also the pivotal debate around the "multiracial" (or "mixed race") experience and the problematic of interracial conflict among people of color after the New Immigration.

Attaching the interrogation of (black) social identities to questions of race and sexuality in the field of vision, Sexton bridges critical concerns in African American and Ethnic Studies with some of the chief discussions taking place in Film and Visual Culture Studies. At present, Sexton is completing a book entitled Amalgamation Schemes: Interracial Sexual Politics and Anti-Blackness in the Americas, which provides a critical meditation on what some have called "the Latin Americanization of US race relations" or the emergence of a "mestizo America" north of the US/Mexico border. Sexton understands this transformation to demand reflection not only upon the effects that such shifts may hold specifically for blacks and other people of color in the US, but also upon the broader global implications of the global dissemination, appropriation, and blowback of racist culture. He examines the ways that multiracial discourse takes up issues of racialized sexuality, racial hierarchy, and the legacies of slavery in the formulation of new social subjects.

His teaching and research revolve around the intersections of race and sexuality, the politics of multiracialism, policing and mass imprisonment, critical theories of culture and society, contemporary cinema, and the psychoanalysis of race.

Selected Publications
Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. (under review).

Edited Volumes
Black Thought in the Age of Terror (in progress) .

Articles
"The Noir Apparent: The Visual Epistemology of Race." (under review).
"Ruse of Engagement: Black Cinema and the New American Century." (under review).
"Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu-Ghraib" with Elizabeth Lee. (under review).
"Proprieties of Coalition: Between Blacks and Asians." (under review).
"Race, Nation, and Empire in a Blackened World." In Radical History Review. (forthcoming)."
"Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control." In Warfare: Prison and the American Homeland. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.
"The Field of Fantasy and the Court of Appeal: On Friday Night Lights and Coach Carter." In Visual Economies of/in Motion. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
"Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading Soul on Ice." In Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2003).
"Raw Life" with Huey Copeland. In Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History. 13:2 (Spring 2003).
"The Avant-garde of White Supremacy" with Steve Martinot. In Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Vol. 9 No. 2 (Summer 2003).
"The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialized Barriers and the Politics of Desire." In Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Vol. 9 No. 2 (Summer 2003).
"There is no Interracial Sexual Relationship: Race, Love, and Sexuality in the Multiracial Movement." In Problems of Resistance: Studies in Alternate Political Cultures. Amherst: Humanities Books, 2001.