Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ainsley LeSure is Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. She specializes in political theory with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory. Her first book project, “Locating Racism in the World,” develops a phenomenological theory of antiblack racism as a reality-violating common sense, generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. This project critically engages post-Civil Rights understandings of antiblack racism and Black studies’ recent pessimism about politics as an effective means to pursue black freedom. At the Cogut Institute, she will be working on a second book manuscript, “The Tricky Business of the Human Question,” which explores the possibilities of universal humanism as a political and ethical aspiration by disentangling it from its assumed antiblackness. The project does this by critically engaging nearly 30 years of scholarship generated by contemporary critical theorists of performance, film, aesthetics, and literary criticism in black studies who trace their mandate back to Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter, and by exploring the relationship between black studies and Western political thought.