Roski Talks: Taj Frazier

Professor Frazier is a cultural historian who explores the arts, political and expressive cultures of the people of the African Diaspora in the United States and elsewhere. His research examines histories and current-day dynamics of race and gender, cultural traffic and contact, urban culture and life, and popular culture. As a Black studies and communication scholar trained in the humanities, his interdisciplinary scholarship, pedagogical mission, and intellectual purpose is aimed at facilitating for different communities: 1) the value of a critical approach to culture, communication, and the historical, ontological, and material dimensions of power, resistance, and subjectivity; 2) old and new creative modes of cultural and political intervention.

He is the author of The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, co-producer of the documentary film The World Is Yours, was on the Scholarship Steering Committee for the audio-visual and traveling art platform Question Bridge: Black Males, and is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Race and Policy and Communication, Culture, & Critique.

Frazier's writings have been published in books including "The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction," "African Americans in Global Affairs", and Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (forthcoming); as well as in academic journals and periodicals such as American Quarterly, China Information, Boom: A Journal of California, Socialism & Democracy, The Journal of History and Cultures, The Journal of African American History, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Black Arts Quarterly.