Meet Professor Zalika Ibaorimi

VolkAI February 27, 2026 Leave a Comment Imported News

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There is much that is mysterious on American college campuses. Ohio State University calls itself “the highest-ranked public university in Ohio, home to world-class faculty.”

Well, a member of that world-class faculty is Zalika U. Ibaorimi of the Department of African American and African Studies.

She is Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities and has unusual areas of expertise, including Black Porn/Sex Work Studies, Dark Black Studies, Spectatorship/Watchability, Black Sexual Logics, Black Queer Theory, Black Digital Intimacy, Black Ontologies, and Black Geographies.

It’s been some time since I was in college, and I’m sure the boundaries of knowledge have been pushed forward a great deal, but I had no idea they had advanced that far. Zalika also calls herself an “antidisciplinary artist,” which is clever. The usual claim is to be interdisciplinary, which implies that you know an awful lot about an awful lot. So I thought I would take a look at some of Zalika’s “antidisciplinary” art.

[link] I found a production called “Jawn Theory,” which fortunately came with a definition.

Jawn Theory “is a Black theory that names itself from within and it urges the home to call a “thing” a “thing,” to call a “place” a “place,” and a “person” a “person.” “Jawn Theory” calls on itself: it disrupts and haunts itself in its own tracks through analytics of Black gender and sexuality.”

It goes on for six minutes.

Now, I admit that a lot of modern art is beyond me, so maybe I bit off more than I could chew. I decided to listen to one of her lectures. I found one called “(Ho)ly Ontology: Black Visual Cultural Geographies of the Sexually Illicit.” You can also find a lecture called “The Bottom Dwellers,” Parts I and II.

There’s no doubt about it. I would have to go back to college to understand Zalika. Or, I could wait for her forthcoming book, to be published by Duke University Press, titled Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators: Human Material and Digital Enfleshments of Shame, Pleasure, and Desire.

Duke is already promoting “Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective.”

It’s about “queer black feminist knowledge production and academic subject formation” and “analyz[ing] the relevance of empirical black holes for theorizing polymorphous black female sexualities.”

Zalika will be in good company.

I think I found a better way to understand this assistant professor of black sexualities. Zelika’s Facebook page, for example, has what now seems to be the many obligatory self-portraits, and with much attention to hair.

Here she is with her own hair, but not her own nails. Here is a rare political post: “Vote like a black feminist,” and here’s another one.

“A hooker and a con man are running America.”

She may not be insulting the First Lady, however, because Zalika says she is a “former sex-worker,” and some of her Instagram-account photos require the contemporary version of the fig leaf.

I leave it to you to determine the significance of this post.

Zelika’s Facebook friends have an endless choice of video self-portraits. I urge you to look at a few.

I’m beginning to think that these videos are the best way to understand this professor rather than listening to her lectures or reading what she writes. She calls herself an Afrofuturist, a sex-positive Black feminist, a queer femme, and a Non-Humanist. She says that she rejects humanism, because it was cooked up by white people who did not consider black people fully human, certainly not black/femme/queer/deviant people. I’ll probably never understand what she means when she says she “considers the discursiveness of critical Humanism as a way to chart the figuration of the Black wh0re [sic] vis-à-vis the counter and anti-Human.”

There are many ways to make a living in the United States. But I do wonder whether the citizens of Ohio think they are getting their money’s worth out of the $83,000 salary Zalika gets as an assistant professor.

But it’s only right that I give her the last word, from what appears to be her most recent published paper, a “research article” called “The pornographer and the party: humanism’s sensuous dismemberment of the black femme body.”

The abstract says it’s a “narrative about how Black femmes of the twenty-first century are eclipsed by the pornographization and ruptured mediascape of the public as captured by the fantasies of a prefixed Humanism; aspects of both their private and public life are commandeered for a variety of purposes and repurposes such as the cautionary tale, moral panic, necrocapital, and other derisive formulations tethered to social-sexual location, Black femme subjectivity, spectacular violation, and death.”