BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Black Sexual Ecologies of the Americas

Fri, October 31, 10:20 to 11:50am, Marriott St Louis Grand, Landmark 3

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

“This wateriness is memory, and history too” (Tinsley 2008, 191). When Omise’eke Tinsley conjures the confluence of racial-gender-sexual memories in diaspora, she speaks of an ecology that is central to the construction of modern Blackness: the Atlantic Ocean. While the theorization of the Black Atlantic remains a critical part of Africana Studies and its related projects, recent scholarship has pointed us to sands, shoals, and other ecologies that challenge the space-time of Blackness (Agard-Jones 2012; King 2019). This panel takes up the ecological expanse of Black life by turning to configurations of Blackness beyond that of the middle passage epistemology (Wright 2015). Focusing on plantation intimacies, queer social spaces, and aesthetics, this panel details how Black sexualities are shaped by built and natural environments. We explore these relations through ethnography, geography, and performance studies, considering how material, sociocultural, and environmental conditions mold sexual identifications and experiences in diaspora. Our research considers the concomitance of race, gender, sexuality and labor in the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and United States, countries that are foundational to our work and living as Black queer scholars. In traveling the watery routes––oceans, seas, rivers––of Black Atlantic diasporas, the panel envisions new grounds for intimacy, interconnection, and transnational solidarity that attend to the plurality of Black genders and sexualities.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations