"The Ecologies of Black Queer Worldmaking."

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

The Black Atlantic is queer. As Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley writes, “Fomented in Atlantic crosscurrents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view hybrid, resistant subjectivities.” Exploring this crosscurrent, the ecologies of black queer worldmaking prompt us to consider the transformative processes involved in creating Black queer spaces, identities, communities, and futures. This panel explores how Black queer subjects cultivate spaces, practices, and networks of resistance and envision liberatory futures through transformative engagements with space, place, art, spirituality, and gender and sexual expression. Through a critical analysis of LGBT and Heritage tourism in Brazil, urban placemaking in Seattle, representations of same-sex love in South Africa, and ritual performance in the Caribbean and its diaspora, the panelists will examine the ways Black women, queer, and trans people across the African Diaspora resist intersecting structures of colonialism, neoliberalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy. These works are pivotal at this moment in which Black queer people and communities are creating ways to connect across diasporic space.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Marlon Bailey

Individual Presentations

• Counter-Spatial Imaginaries: Black Feminist Urban Arts Placemaking as Queer Worldmaking Practice” - Mako Ward, Arizona State University

• “(Trans)Altars: Embodied Performances of Black Queer Religiosity” - Elena Guzman, Indiana University Bloomington

• Now This is What I Paid For!”: African American Tourism in Brazil’s “Black Mecca” - Christina Carney

• Inxeba: Making Black Queer Space in "traditional" South Africa. - Xavier Livermon, UC Santa Cruz

Discussant

• Kwame Otu