About

Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. He teaches undergraduate courses on African American humor and literary history, as well as graduate seminars on Black archive studies and Black aesthetic theory. Nishikawa's first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His ongoing major work, Black Paratext, studies how book design has influenced the production and reception of African American literature from the 1940s to the contemporary book arts scene. He has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a focus on newspapers, magazines, and independent presses. Nishikawa is also involved in curatorial projects, such as the Black Independent Film series at Princeton and the Sites of Memory exhibition of the Toni Morrison Papers, which he advises on and collaborates with Professor Autumn Womack on a related book project.

Research topics

• Art
• Computer Science
• Information Retrieval
• History
• Mathematics
• Literature
• Geology
• Ethnology

Selected publications

• Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade

  Reception Texts Readers Audiences History · 2025-12-01

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• Martin L. Kilson, <i>Black Intellectuals and Black Society</i>

  American Literary History · 2025-01-01

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• Harlem Composition: Adapting Chester Himes into French Comics

  Modernism/Modernity Print Plus · 2025-05-20

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  Melvin Van Peebles remembers that it was 1963 or 1964 when his boss at the weekly news magazine France-Observateur assigned him to do a story on someone “who had just won some big French crime writing prize.” That someone happened to be another Black American writer living in Paris, Chester Himes—although he had won the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1958, not

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• Pulping the Racial Imagination

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-06-27

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• Towards Intersectional Queer Bibliography: Three Perspectives from a Roundtable Discussion

  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America · 2024-05-29 · 1 citations

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• The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14 · 3 citations

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  African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.

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• Print Culture and Literary Sociology

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

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  In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

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• Darieck Scott, <i>Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics</i>

  American Literary History · 2023-05-01

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  In order to illuminate the conceptual stakes of his book Keeping It Unreal, Darieck Scott puts a new spin on a popular cliché: "not only should you bring a knife to a gunfight, but you should bring a velvet camisole as well" (40).The phrase, first uttered in Brian De Palma's 1987 film The Untouchables, is usually taken to mean being unprepared for or outmatched in a given situation.Here Scott not only discovers a use for a knife in a gunfight-turning a supposed disadvantage to one's advantage-but also stresses the importance of looking good when taking it up.We can visualize the scenario: our hero gains access to a backup weapon while distracting his antagonist with a bit of flair.This at once covert and fabulous image encapsulates the lines of thought opened up by Black queer appropriation of the superhero comics tradition.

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• ‘In retrospect’: <i>Object Lessons</i> forum

  Feminist Theory · 2023-02-19

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  Our contribution takes shape as reflections on Object Lessons (Wiegman, 2012) from the perspective of three scholars of race, gender and sexuality who were also graduate students of Robyn Wiegman in the mid-2000s at Duke University. All three of us took Introduction to Feminist Theory with her and all three of us received graduate certificates in Feminist Studies. Our educational and career trajectories also share this similarity: we received PhDs in the disciplines (English, Comparative Literature and French), but went on to jobs that are either completely or partially housed in departments invested in studying what Wiegman calls ‘identity knowledges' (namely, African American Studies and Gender Studies). In these essays, we reflect on how Wiegman's course helped shaped our approaches to academic knowledge production and how her reflexive pedagogy animates not only Object Lessons but also our own critiques of identity’s institutionalized forms.

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• Writing Freedom before and after Emancipation

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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Frequent coauthors

• Thomas F. DeFrantz

  University of Iowa

  4 shared

• Cynthia Greenlee Donnell

  National Wheelchair Basketball Association

  4 shared

• Anthony Kelley

  4 shared

• Charlie Piot

  Duke University

  4 shared

• Bayo Holsey

  Emory University

  4 shared

• William Sandy

  National Wheelchair Basketball Association

  4 shared

• J. C. Leonard

  National Wheelchair Basketball Association

  4 shared

• Stephen W. Smith

  Langley Research Center

  4 shared