Professor Dr. Kinohi Nishikawa

Biography

Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. At Princeton, he teaches undergraduate courses on African American humor and literary history, as well as graduate seminars on Black archive studies and aesthetic theory. His book, "Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground," published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018, explores the impact of Black pulp fiction. Currently, he is working on a major project titled "Black Paratext," which studies the influence of book design on the production and reception of African American literature from the 1940s to the contemporary book arts scene. Nishikawa has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, magazines, and independent presses. He also curates the Black Independent Film series at the Princeton Garden Theatre and advises on the "Sites of Memory" exhibition featuring the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University Library. His recent publications include an essay on Percival Everett’s novel "Telephone" and articles on the design and redesigns of Ishmael Reed’s novel "Mumbo Jumbo." His work has appeared in several edited collections, including "Entertained? New Essays on Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century" and "Ralph Ellison in Context."

Research Interests