Jonathan W. Gray
Faculty Fellow
Jonathan W. Gray, Associate Professor English at the CUNY Graduate Center & John Jay College is the author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (University Press of Mississippi) and is currently working on the book project Illustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics. Prof. Gray contributed the essay “Race” to NYU’s Keywords for Comics Studies, co-edited the essay collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels for Palgrave McMillian and served as the founding editor of the Journal of Comics and Culture (Pace U. Press). Prof. Gray’s meditations on race and representation in popular culture have appeared in Film Quarterly, The New Republic, Entertainment Weekly, Medium, and Salon.
Participating Years
2022–2023
Revolutionary Arts
Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”
2011–2012
How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture
In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?