Yannick Giovanni Marshall

“from the native quarters of Black Studies”

Biography

Yannick Giovanni Marshall is a political theorist, literary writer, and speaker specializing in anti-colonial Black thought, political exile, and dissent.

He taught Contemporary Black Thought in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts before leaving the United States in protest of the escalating suppression of Black Studies, protest, and academic freedom.

Marshall is the author of The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon(Bloomsbury / Zed Books, 2025), which challenges the containment of Black radical traditions through liberal and Civil Rights discourse and re-centers radical resistance as viable political practice.

He is currently a Visiting International Professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum’s Institute for Social Movements, where his work engages questions of dissent, institutional power, and political resistance in comparative and transnational perspective.

His current work brings his scholarly and creative projects into active conversation during a period of intensified global debate over migration, dissent, and institutional authority. His research develops an in-progress book project, Hostiles, which approaches African Indigenous anti-colonial resistance not as history but as political methodology for the authoritarian present. The project examines how insurgent traditions forged under colonial occupation and racial counterinsurgency offer analytic and strategic resources for confronting contemporary regimes of surveillance, pacification, and managed dissent.

Alongside his scholarly work, Marshall is a literary and creative writer. He is completing a novel centered on xenophobia, Caribbean migration, radical fugitivity, white supremacist totalitarianism, and the police-state, supported by a Research and Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. His creative practice blends his theoretical concerns into narrative and poetic forms as parallel modes.

His essays have appeared in Al Jazeera English, Current Affairs, and Black Perspectives. He has also been interviewed on podcasts including Black Myths, The Young Turks, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, and The Last Dope Intellectual. His work circulates across academic, cultural, and organic intellectual contexts, and his public talks and invited lectures have been delivered internationally, including at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin), Aarhus University, and other academic and cultural institutions across the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.

Marshall earned his PhD from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and an MA from its Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. His work bridges anti-colonial political theory, Black Studies, postcolonialism, and the study of the police and the police-state. He has taught at CalArts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Knox College, Colby College, and Bates College.

He is the founder of Further Black (furtherblack.com), an independent platform for dissent and intellectual freedom built beyond collaborationist academia.

Featured Talk

The End of Universities: Intellectual Life Post Academia’s Capitulation to White Supremacist Power


This keynote blends personal narrative with critical theory to explore what it means for a Black Studies professor to flee the United States. Drawing from The End of Supplication and public essays, it examines insurgent traditions of self-exile, the criminalization of dissent, and the obligations of institutions and individuals under white supremacist siege.

Selected Background

Education

  • Ph.D., Columbia University, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, 2017
  • M.Phil., Columbia University, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, 2014
  • M.A., Columbia University, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, 2012
  • M.A., Columbia University, African-American Studies, 2010
  • B.A. (Honors), University of Toronto, Political Science and Caribbean Studies, 2007

Books

  • The End of Supplication: The Invention of the Prostrate African and the Replacement of Black Marronage in America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
  • Empress (Kellom Books, 2009)
  • Old Friend, We Made This for You (Kellom Books, 2007)

Selected Essays

  • “Elegy for Jay-Z,” Current Affairs, (Fall 2025)
  • “The Day Millennials’ Hip Hop went to the Klan’s Ball,” Al Jazeera (January 27, 2025)
  • “Black freedom has never been on the ballot,” Al Jazeera (August 24, 2024)
  • “Universities v Protest: A letter from a lesser alumnus,” Al Jazeera (June 1, 2024)
  • “After their ‘Racial Reckoning’: The Black Anti-colonial Rising,” Al Jazeera (February 15, 2023)
  • “The Future is Post-Western,” Al Jazeera (May 20, 2022)
  • “Black Liberal, Your Time is Up,” Al Jazeera (June 1, 2020)

Selected Talks

  • The End of Supplication, University of Amsterdam, ETH Zurich, Utretcht University, 2026
  • The End of Universities, Several Institutions, 2025
  • Message from Exile: Why I, a Black Studies Professor, Left the US, Several Institutions, 2025
  • “The Runaway’s Reckoning: Marronage and the Death of Civil Rights,” James Madison University, 2024
  • “The Second Jim: White Abolitionists’ Invention of the Supplicant Negro,” Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2023
  • “Community, Emotions, New Terror,” University of Melbourne, 2023