Suchergebnisse

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!).

Drawn from an archive of online pornographic selfies, this meditation reconsiders black gay art historical critique of the visual fetish of the black male body in the context of the undisciplined and contradictory circulation of images on the Internet. It asks: Does authorship of the image, or the action of gazing, make you a subject? Who is the gazer in the context of the Internet? What does it feel like to be an object looking at an object?

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.

What does the promise of 1959—¡Venceremos! (We Will Win!)—mean to blacks in the United States, and what are the possible futures for the continuation and expansion of revolution? As commentary by black individuals who visited or took refuge in Revolutionary Cuba and my own ethnographic work on the island, roughly from 1998 to 2003, show, the vision of Cuba has become more salient and more complex as the position of blacks in the United States becomes more fraught with contradictions. As must any contemporary 50-year-old, the Cuban Revolution must now reconcile intention and effect and chart its future course in a world very different from the one it was born into.