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In There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls "Black gay habits of mind." In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Invoking "a larger freedom" -- 1 Looking (at) "Afro-Cuba(n)" -- 2 Discursive Sleight of Hand: Race, Sex, Gender -- 3 The Erotics and Politics of Self-making -- 4 De Cierta Manera . . . Hasta Cierto Punto (One Way or Another . . . Up to a Certain Point) -- 5 Friendship as a Mode of Survival -- 6 ¡Hagamos un Chen! (We Make Change!) -- Coda: ¡Vamos a Vencer! (We Will Win!) -- Notes -- References -- Index

Introduction : invoking "a larger freedom" -- Looking (at) "Afro-Cuba(n)" -- Discursive sleight of hand: race, sex, gender -- The erotics and politics of self-making -- De cierta manera ... hasta cierto punto (one way or another ... up to a certain point) -- Friendship as a mode of survival -- Hagamos un chen! (we make change!) -- Coda : vamos a vencer! (we will win!).

This essay sketches the parameters of black/queer/diaspora ethics, aesthetics, and methodologies vis-à-vis conjunctural moments in black queer studies, women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, queer theory, and on-the-ground expressive practices. This genealogical matrix of the present moment argues that black/queer/diaspora work's love ethic, and radical roots in black and women of color feminisms, uniquely constructs it as an organic project of multivalent and multiscalar reclamation, revisioning, and futurity toward producing deeply humane and capacious analyses that both reflect "real life" on the ground and speculate on liberatory models—projecting our imaginations forward, toward possible futures.

This conversation between Jafari S. Allen and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley (with Natalie Bennett, Rosamond S. King, Rinaldo Walcott, and Michelle Wright) follows a lively debate during the Black/Queer/Diaspora Work(ing) Group symposium in 2009. This debate centered on the promise and pitfalls associated with pushing beyond disciplinary frameworks and methodological conventions toward, for example, narrative theorizing and creative responses as a legitimate way to represent black women's (erotic) histories. Whither interdisciplinarity? What are the limits of various approaches and genres? This conversation serves as a preface to an excerpt from Tinsley's work of historical fiction. The conversation takes up scholars' responses to the impossibility of knowing some of the particularities of historical experience and subjectivity, as Tinsley's contribution attempts to revindicate the theoretics of those who, in Barbara Christian's words, "have always been a race for theory."

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- FOREWORD -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1. Black/Queer Rhizomatics -- CHAPTER 2. The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You're Dead -- CHAPTER 3. Troubling the Waters -- CHAPTER 4. Gender Trouble in Triton -- CHAPTER 5. Reggaetón's Crossings -- CHAPTER 6. I Represent Freedom -- CHAPTER 7. To Transcender Transgender -- CHAPTER 8. Toward A Hemispheric Analysis of Black Lesbian Feminist Activism and Hip Hop Feminism -- CHAPTER 9. The Body Beautiful -- CHAPTER 10. Black Sissy Masculinity and the Politics of Dis-respectability -- CHAPTER 11. Let's Play -- CHAPTER 12. Black Gay (Raw) Sex -- CHAPTER 13. Black Data -- CHAPTER 14. Boystown -- CHAPTER 15. Beyond the Flames -- CHAPTER 16. The Strangeness of Progress and the Uncertainty of Blackness -- CHAPTER 17. Re-membering Audre -- CHAPTER 18. On the Cusp of Deviance -- CHAPTER 19. Something Else to Be -- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY -- CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX