Please read, "Call me Richard," our Obituary for Dr. Richard Iton, to be published in PS: Political Science & Politics. Click here to read the full version.

Call me Richard

“If we think of the fantastic as a genre that destabilizes, at least momentarily, our understandings of the distinctions between the reasonable and the unreasonable, and reason itself, the proper and improper, and propriety itself, by bringing into the field of play those potentials we have forgotten, or did not believe accessible or feasible, I would suggest its effects are not all that dissimilar from those of blackness, with its compulsive externalities and unintended consequences.”

Richard Iton, the authorial ‘I’ of these compelling insights about the diasporic nexus of black politics and black popular cultures, our colleague and a special friend to many of us in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, passed away unexpectedly on April 24, 2013. He was 51 years old. Richard lived within the cultural and political membrane that entangled and connected the western nation and the black diaspora. This affectively and performatively located his biography across four main cities with significant black populations. He was born in Montreal and undertook his undergraduate studies there at McGill University. Baltimore was where he attended graduate school at John Hopkins University. Toronto was where he secured his first academic appointment at the University of Toronto, Department of Political Science and where he gained tenure. And Chicago was where he lived while he was teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, where he became a full professor. Richard, whose parents migrated to Montreal from the Caribbean (Jamaica and St. Vincent), was deeply marked and influenced by all these traces of blackness, in profound and subtle ways... Click here for the full version.

Richard Iton Lecture: April 7, 2011, Cornell University