Kevin Rigby Jr.

Kevin Rigby Jr. is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. A scholar of Black Studies and political theory, his work examines the meaning of Black protest in the twenty-first century and the relationship of blackness to political possibility and imagination more broadly. 

His book project, tentatively titled Black Protest at the Limits of the Political, treats Black revolt as a philosophical form that exposes the ontological limits of political reason, tracing—through the Schomburg Center’s riot archives, state reports, and Black aesthetic responses—how rebellion is continually translated into moral narratives of legibility, life, and democratic renewal. Reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings as text rather than historical subject within this genealogy, and building on research from his dissertation on protest during the Black Lives Matter movement, the book shows how nonviolence and contemporary regimes of political appearance—from the civil rights era to the 2020 Minneapolis uprising—function as ontological fantasies that discipline Black antagonism into intelligible political form. In doing so, it reframes blackness not as a political identity seeking recognition or reform, but as an antagonistic force that discloses the limits of the world itself, opening new ways of thinking being, political possibility, action, and freedom beyond legibility, redemption, and life-bound moral horizons.

Dr. Rigby’s writing has appeared in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and he has been profiled in outlets such as Ebony and the Detroit Free Press. Beyond academia, he brings years of experience as a community, electoral, and labor organizer, including co-founding the Detroit chapter of Black Youth Project 100 and organizing gig workers with SEIU 1021 in the San Francisco Bay Area.