While such theorization is bound to matters that entail a sociological specificity, the questions that thereby emerge likewise entail the opening up of “a whole series of ontological matters.” Such double entailment follows from Sexton’s focus on the singular “sociopolitical status” of blackness in the modern world: if blackness “opens the space for articulating what is unthought,” this is because blackness is “that which relates to the undoing or unraveling of every social bond” and so inhabits them, negatively, from within. This interview attends to and foregrounds Sexton’s theorization of the meaning, stakes, and implications of the unlimited field of black studies. Black studies-as “an internally differentiated project”-concerns what Sexton describes as “an unlimited field,” one that ramifies upon, because it is implicated in, all fields of study.
Importantly, black studies is here understood not as one field among many, such that it would become identifiable through its division from others. The range of themes addressed in Sexton’s work is motivated by a central commitment to the field of black studies.
In these books, as well as in his numerous articles and essays, Sexton addresses themes of contemporary political and popular culture, or more broadly the cultural politics of the post-civil rights era United States, focusing on questions of race and sexuality, policing and prisons, multiracial coalition, and contemporary film.
