Richard Purcell

I research, teach and write about film and media, black literature, poetry, music and other forms of black performance and visual art. Secondary areas of interest are in aesthetic theory, Black Studies as well as Marxist and post-Marxist thought. I am currently pursing two interconnected book projects. The first investigates the intertwined histories of independent/experimental cinema and graffiti writing culture in New York City in order to talk about public art and the legacies of radical politics, the cultural and political economies of “watching”, the rise of corporate telecommunications networks and the surveillance state during the Long Seventies. The other book looks at how the social and economic discourses of neoliberalism and finance capital influence the way black musicians, novelists and performances artists think about the ontological status of the “work” of art as well as their own status as art workers from the late-1980s into the Great Recession.