Nothing to Lose, the World to Gain!

Meet James Bliss, Doctoral Student in Culture & Theory, and a member of the Humanities Graduate Liaison Network!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Program in Culture and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. My dissertation project, “Nothing To Lose, The World to Gain: Insurgent Self-Writing and the Politics of Violence,” explores connections between the anarchist and Black radical traditions around theorizations of terror and narrative, desire and failure, and state violence and sexual difference. I began the project as a way into the lifeworlds of figures like Emma Goldman, Assata Shakur, Alexander Berkman, and Kuwasi Balagoon, as a way to combine my old disciplinary training in political theory with my study of continental philosophy, literary criticism, and Black feminist and queer theory.  The project moves across the genres of their creative and political expression to examine how these insurgent activists used self-writing to theorize political violence. 

My second book project, ‘Critical Theory in Eclipse: Missed Encounters with Black Feminism,’ is an intellectual history of Black feminist theorizing after 1966, and a study of the ways that the discourses we now call critical theory and cultural studies emerged from failed encounters with Black feminism. My published work appears or is forthcoming in Palimpsest, Signs, Mosaic, Feminist Formations, and Feminist Studies.