After Dark: Empire, Race, and the Political Economy of Nightlife

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Within the imaginaries of empire, nightlife has long played a critical role at different stages: from a conduit for cross-racial interzones and a repository for fantasies of interracial contact at the height of empire (Mumford 1997; Heap 2009) to a space for worldmaking (Buckland 2009), a form for self-fashioning (moore 2015), and a site where minoritarian bodies can converge in space outside the purview of normative, political control (Adeyemi et al. 2022). In this constellation of inquiries, nightlife is often remarked upon due to its temporal difference from the day and its neoliberal meter, the monotonous 9-5, of capitalist toil and straight time (Boellstorff 2007). Nightlife, from this vantage point, is imagined as a discretely separate order to the waged hours of the day, providing umbrage for escape from the pressures of the day while taking to task nightlife’s creative production as the basis for making new worlds. This panel interrogates the supposed separation of night/life, and its attendant counterpublics, from the ordered temporality of ordinary life under global imperial structures.

The first paper turns to Philadelphia and the geography of the gayborhood in the Global North to argue that metropolitan spaces of contemporary gay nightlife in the global North remain inextricably tied to the expropriative, post-slavery, and/or settler landscapes that they are situated in. The historical legacies of Philadelphia’s spatialized coloniality, particularly as the “Birthplace of America,” scaffold how gay bars, clubs, and businesses (which primarily serve cisgender white/nonblack gay male clientele) manage Black LGBTQ+ residents’ participation in the contemporary Gayborhood’s nightlife economies. The second paper revisits the long 80s (Allen 2021) to examine how the 1989 and 1991 Love Ball fundraisers represented a pivotal moment for house-structured ballroom culture, as houses came together to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis while grappling with the newfound visibility and the mainstreaming of a once-underground community. While a partnership with Design Industry For Fighting AIDS and various celebrities provided mobilization of much needed resources, it also expedited ballroom’s transformation into a global commodity. The paper traces the Love Ball fundraisers as an arena where ballroom performers deployed “embodied avatars” to shield their interiority in the middle of the first rapid mainstreaming of ballroom culture (McMillan 2015). The final paper examines the vexed relationship between nighttime and the category of “life” in Lagos, looking instead at taverns turned into homes with the contemporary proliferation of kill-your-traffic bars. These are sites where urban residents try to avoid traffic, subverting sites of entertainment into functional proxy-homes or temporary shelters. As a form of temporal waywardness, these forms of nocturnal inhabitation disrupt the idea of “nightlife” as a contained excess within functionalist imaginations of social reproduction and instead point to the shapeless contours of nightlife that express a social world in disarray. Contemporary night/life in Lagos point out to the ways in which hegemonic norms fail all the time, as well as to points of potential rearticulation of a politics of solidarity, of shared homelessness, vulnerability, and abjection from “straight time.”

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Gayborhoods as Antiblack Homotopias: Antiblackness, Gay Sociality, and (Neo)Liberal Spatiality in the (Philadelphia) Gayborhood - Marc Ridgell, University of Pennsylvania

• The Love Ball - Victor Ultra Omni, Emory University

• Un/settlements: On Lagos Night/life and Queer Inhabitation(s) - CHRYSTEL OLOUKOI, University of Washington-Seattle Campus

Chair

• eva pensis, University of Pennsylvania

Biographical Information

Marc Ridgell is a second-year PhD student in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research investigates how Black LGBTQ+ communities navigate and respond to macro-level processes of urban governance–including gentrification, development, and policing–within nightlife and nonprofit work in the neoliberal city. Since being at Penn, they have collaborated with or been supported by the Center for Africana Studies; Price Lab; Humanities, Urban, and Design Initiative; the Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project; and the Social Science Research Council. In 2023, Marc graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and Point Foundation Scholar. You can find them doing pilates, jogging, scribbling poetry, or checking out the newest arts exhibition.

Victor Ultra Omni is a PhD Candidate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their dissertation, The Love Ball: A History of New York City's House-Structured Ballroom Culture 1972-1992, provides a historical treatment of the origins of Ballroom culture. Currently they are co-editing Trans Studies Quarterly issue 12.4 with Dr. Eva Pensis and Ballroom-archivist-filmmaker Noelle Deleon. Their writing is published in Trans Studies Quarterly (TSQ), the African American Intellectual Historical Society, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, and Applications among other publications. For the 2025–2026-year, Victor is a Mellon 2025 Scholar in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute and Black Women Writers and Intellectuals Fellow at the Rose Library.

Chrystel Oloukoï is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Their research and interests are at the intersection of black studies, political economy, abolition geographies and queer theory. Their book project, black nocturnal: insurgent ecologies of the night in Lagos, examines imaginations of the night and practices of sociality in colonial and present times. The book contends with the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nocturnal ecologies as sites of respite, life-making and otherwise futures. Their work has appeared in Air Afrique, World Records, Les Carnets de géographes, Sociétés politiques comparées as well as the edited volume, Exploring Nightlife (2018).