How Professor John Drabinski Wrote Three Books at Once

How Black vernacular culture, Baldwin and the Atlantic world shape his latest scholarship.

Earlier this year, Professor of African American and Africana Studies and English John Drabinski finished a remarkable sprint, submitting three completed book manuscripts in just five days—a rare milestone in academic publishing.

The three books, “Atlantic Theory” (Edinburgh University Press), “So Unimaginable a Price” (Northwestern University Press) and “At the Margins of Nihilism” (Fordham University Press), together chart Drabinski’s sweeping scholarship that spans philosophy, literature, Black studies and beyond. Though each book takes up distinct subjects, from comparative Atlantic thought to James Baldwin to the cultural politics of blues and jazz, they converge on a single idea Drabinski has been developing for decades: that everyday Black cultural life carries its own deep theories about the world.

After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis in 1996, Drabinski planned to focus his scholarship on post-World War II Jewish philosophy. But during a talk he gave in Lima, Perú, on trauma, loss and how life continues after catastrophe, a colleague asked why he didn’t turn those same questions toward the places where he lived and taught. The Americas, the colleague noted, are “synonymous with trauma and loss, conquest and enslavement.” When he returned home, Drabinski began learning the Black intellectual tradition and ultimately reinvented himself as a scholar of the Black Atlantic world.

Today, Drabinski teaches at the intersections of critical theory, cultural studies, and vernacular culture and politics at UMD. He is also the co-host of “The Black Studies Podcast,” a series of conversations with Black studies scholars from across the country.

We recently sat down with Drabinski to talk about what drove him to finish his three latest book projects, the throughline that connects them, and why Baldwin is the gravitational center of his scholarship.

Congratulations on publishing three books with major presses back-to-back. How did you do it?

I had all three about two-thirds written, each one had a reason why it wasn’t fully completed. I kept putting [Baldwin] off, the “Atlantic Theory” book felt a little unruly and the nihilism book started as an essay; a friend read it in an Uber and said, “this should just be a book.” That, plus a kind of mortality moment—I was 54, about to turn 55—made me think, I can’t screw around. I alternated weeks of editing and writing, finished the drafts and sent them all off within five days.

What connects the three books?

When I started alternating between the projects, I discovered that maybe I have one big idea I’ve been working with for 20 years, articulated over and over again in different contexts. The idea is that there is profound political and theoretical significance in everyday life, or what I call “vernacular culture.” Vernacular culture isn’t just an example of something; it’s a set of theoretical works that speak back to conventional European models of the scholar or writer. It shows how the African diaspora has been doing theory since slavery. The plantation had theoretical work going on. And as readers, we have to attune ourselves to what that theory is teaching us.

That idea shows up differently across the three books. In “Atlantic Theory” I’m doing that in a comparative context across Europe, Africa and the Americas. In the Baldwin book, I’m thinking about his attunement to blues and to Black English as a theorization of the African American self. And in “At the Margins of Nihilism,” I look mostly at Ellison but also Angela Davis and others writing on blues and jazz, to talk about what life is like in an anti-Black world, and how those writers uncover an entirely different world than anti-Blackness wants it to be.

How did you actually write and keep momentum?

I alternated week by week across projects to stay fresh. At one point I just said, let me write a thousand words a day until I have a full draft. I’m not an obsessive re-reader; I’d get caught in that spiral. Instead, I hand-write key quotations on 3x5 cards, carry them, and a few cards in a row can give me 20 pages. And I cut hard when I need to—the nihilism book was severely cut down; some chapters became a different project. Then I submitted the manuscripts without endlessly fussing with them. My ethic is: let them say no.

You’ve said that you sometimes devote an entire summer to learning a new theme or thinker in Black studies. What draws you to that approach?

One year it was mass incarceration; another summer I focused on the war in Congo. Other times I’ve spent a whole summer reading a single figure—like Claudia Jones or Angela Davis—because I felt I needed to understand their work more deeply. Those deep dives keep me learning and often recalibrate how I think and teach. They become the grounding for new courses, new questions and sometimes new books.

And James Baldwin was one of those deep dives.

I came to Baldwin late. One summer I just decided to read him, and it completely changed my intellectual life. My late friend and colleague Jeffrey Ferguson used to tell me, “Baldwin answers all your questions,” and once I started reading, I realized he was right. Baldwin has shaped almost everything I’ve written and almost every class I teach. At some point in every course, I end up saying, “Here’s the Baldwin essay behind this idea.”

This book feels like the moment in which I have finally said what I’ve been trying to say about the world through Baldwin. I focus on a handful of essays like “Many Thousands Gone,” “Princes and Powers” and “Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone,” where Baldwin really crystallizes his vision of living in an anti-Black world. I also worked very hard on my voice. I wanted readers to feel guided through Baldwin’s thinking. For me, Baldwin isn’t just a subject; he’s the center of how I think, write and teach.

How do teaching and music shape your scholarship, and what’s next?

Teaching makes me explain things, which makes me a better editor. Music is very important to my understanding of all this. My next project finally foregrounds that: a theoretical book on soul music, especially Memphis soul, doing close listening to those little second-and-a-half snippets and asking what they teach us about Black time under anti-Black conditions. 

This article by Jessica Weiss '05 was originally published on the UMD Department of English's website

Published on Fri, Dec 5, 2025 - 11:11AM