a trans-disciplinary scholar, Malaklou publishes in academic journals like Theory & Event, Rhizomes, Black Camera, National Political Science Review, Trans-Scripts, and the Journal of critical animal studies; and in online jounrnals like syndicate. Click on the icon above to learn more about her peer-reviewed publications.
“Rather than have access to time as a moving marker, which is to say, rather than have access to civilizational discourse, to a progress narrative, or to (his)story— even, to an alternative (his)story (or, to her-story)—the Black African is instead imagined in the canonical texts that define and respond EuroEnlightenment humanism as forever stuck in time, specifically, in the bush—in a time before (human) time.”
Malaklou, M.S. (2021). Reaching Backwards in Time: The Feltness of Unfreedom in an Antiblack World. Theory & Event 24(2), 598-604. doi:10.1353/tae.2021.0029.
the black/trans/femme(inist) “moves not where she shouldn’t but when she shouldn’t, with a wilding imagination that is out of time, in no-time, in any time.
Her improvisational getaway is ‘[a] dance of body,’ ‘[a] waltz of hips’ (Marquis Bey 2021, 196). Not an identity (arrival) but a praxis (departure), the black/trans/femme(inist) ‘turns/And…turns/And…turns’ (Bey 2021, 195), unfixing ‘all that we might place under the heading of time’ (Nahum Chandler 2018).
Positivism and progress — the promise of a “beyond” — are not hers to claim (they never were). Her unsanctioned movements built this “time of the now” (Walter Benjamin 1968, 261 [XIV]), ‘danc[ing] the beginning of humanity and the genesis of creativity’ (Bey 2021, 198), and she’s ‘still fucking here’ (Bey 2021, 32), threading Man’s timeline, skipping rocks across the coordinates of his longue durée.”
Malaklou, M.S. (2023). dancing in dehiscence. Syndicate. “Symposium on Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism.”
other writings
Malaklou, M. S. (2022). Loving with bell, leaping with Fanon, and landing nowhere. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 30(2), 66-77.
Malaklou, M. S. (2021). Surviving the Ends of Man: On the animal and/as black gaze in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 18(2), 70–99.
Malaklou, M. S. (2018). 'Dilemmas' of Coalition and the Chronopolitics of Man: Towards an Insurgent Black Feminine Otherwise. Theory & Event, 21(1), 215–258.
public scholarship
Malaklou is perhaps best known for her social media hashtag #therevolutionwillnotbehumanized and for her think pieces—on topics ranging from Beyoncé’s and Jay-z’s black femme(inism)s, to trayvon martin’s murder, to DAPL and its relationship to the movement for black life, to the sports-media complex’s exploitation of black flesh. In addition to publishing this work in The feminist wire, counterpunch, and (most recently) the conversationalist, malaklou elaborates these interventions as a guest correspondent on Always already: a critical theory podcast. Click on the image to learn more about her public scholarship.
