Michelle M. Wright, Emory College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, discusses her research on literary, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses on Blackness and Black identity in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Germanophone African Diaspora, from the 18th to 21st centuries. She published her first book, Becoming Black: Creating an Identity in the African Diaspora, with Duke UP in 2004, and her second book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, with UMN Press in 2015. Her current project, Feeling Europe: Black and African Diasporas in the Heart of Empire, looks at how space, place, and affect destabilize yet expand notions of home and racial belonging. She is also co-editor of several books. Here, we discuss “freedom, agency, and refuge” across a broad swath of her past and current work.
