Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied Listening

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon K. Gill
Keyword(s):  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Black Queer Diaspora

Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

Frottage ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
Keguro Macharia
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Black Queer Studies ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Black Queer

This chapter identifies Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a fault line between black diaspora studies and queer studies, and argues that it is a central work for theorizing the inextricability of blackness and sexuality in colonial modernity. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, an uneasy consensus had been reached in work by Diana Fuss, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, and Kobena Mercer that queer scholars could learn from Fanon’s work on blackness, but he was too homophobic for queer scholars to engage. So successful has this divide been that almost no contemporary scholarly work in black queer studies and black queer diaspora studies engages Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In turn, almost none of the important scholarship on Fanon takes sexuality as a foundational element of his thinking. My chapter argues that Fanon provides a genealogy of sexuality that has blackness as its foundation. The black person’s body is the psychic object of colonial modernity’s desire and the material through which such desire is expressed. Simply put, within the world created by colonial modernity—I use Sylvia Wynter’s 1492 as a handy starting point—desire and sexuality cannot be imagined without the black person’s body. In the latter part of the chapter, I move beyond this genealogical account and examine how Fanon’s attention to touch—“Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”—can be juxtaposed with Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to imagine and practice black livability. I read Fanon’s final injunction to “touch” the other as reclaiming frottage for black diasporic collectivity.

The Visual Life of Black Queer Diaspora

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Smalls
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Black African ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Black Queer Diaspora ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractIn this essay, I consider the ways in which the visual representations of four contemporary black queer diaspora artists – Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), James Chuchu (Kenya), and Adejoke Tugbiyele (American-born Nigerian) – constitute, reflect, and challenge the porous intersectionality associated with the concepts ‘black,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘diaspora.’ The essay foregrounds the inter- and trans-cultural processes of visuality in highlighting the shifting terrains of black (African) and queer diasporic concerns that reside and circulate in physical and ideological spaces beyond the Anglo- and US-centric ones. As well, what follows offers the potential for opening up new horizons and nuanced significations within and beyond these categories. The investigation begins broadly by first exploring the slipperiness of the notions ‘black,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘diaspora,’ and then examines selected forms of visual representation that both sustain and disrupt the intersecting dimensions of these ideas. The essay takes interest in envisioning a diasporic future that liberates black queer lives and imagination.

Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Queer Diaspora

The introduction sets out the field of critical kinship studies and its relation to diaspora studies, black Atlantic studies and queer studies. It offers an overview of relevant works of diaspora and black Atlantic studies and queer studies, and how these fields are brought together in theorizations of queer diaspora. It then turns to the question of how to do critical kinship studies to suggest a double-pronged approach to the study of kinship. The study of kinship is both particularly interesting and particularly complex in postcolonial contexts, as kinship can be used both as a tool of colonial power and a means of anticolonial resistance, and the novels studied in this book suggest that kinship often does both.

scholarly journals Why Queer Diaspora?

2008 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meg Wesling
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Natural Categories ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/Butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer.

Conscripts of Migration

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Ian Foster
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Diasporic Literature ◽  
Global North ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Queer Diaspora

Global migration is more pronounced than it has ever been while issues concerning immigration are constantly in the news. Yet answers as to why remain few and far between. Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and theLiterature of New African Diasporas intersects black Atlantic, postcolonial, and queer diaspora studies to answer these increasingly crucial questions regarding crises of immigration by rethinking migration historically and globally. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. This book uses the term conscription as a way to understand the political and economic systems that undergird contemporary immigration and its colonial histories while providing the first substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature: migritude. Authors like FatouDiome, Shailja Patel, Nadifa Mohamed, Diriye Osman and others, address vital issues of migrancy, diaspora, global refugee crises, racism against immigrants, identity, gender, sexuality, resurgent nationalisms, and neoliberal globalization.

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