Umniya Najaer

Umniya aims to cultivate a Black femme materialist philosophy of history to think through biological reproduction and biological futurity, mothering and maternal refusal, erotics and processes of sexualization, rape culture and paradigms of consent, and objecthood and anthropocentrism, to name a new. While her work is first and foremost rooted in Black feminist theory, Umniya draws on new materialist philosophies, queer of color critique, history of science and performance theory to chart linkages between biological reproduction, race, the nation state, and modern concepts of the subject, liberty, and freedom. Her dissertation centers the lives, bodies, and material objects of Black women through history to theorize everything from enslaved women’s acts of infanticide to the torture devices used to punish such acts of reproductive autonomy.

Umniya is also Cave Canem fellow whose first cycle of poetry, Armeika, was published in 2018 by Akashic Books as part of the New-Generation African Poets series.