By
Tavia Nyong'o
November 11, 2014
Through an engagement with José Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer-of-color counterpublicity, this essay proposes that we participate in his legacy through acts of methexis—or “group sharing”—rather than mimesis. Muñoz and Pedro Zamora are two figures from the Miami-based Cuban exile community who subvert the clichéd image of that community as a conservative force in US politics and culture. Rereading Muñoz’s writings on Zamora of The Real World, season 3, and recounting how Zamora shared out the unsharable experience of his death, the essay discusses three engagements with Zamora’s memory: a 2000 graphic novel, a 2008 biopic, and a 2014 performance by the art collective My Barbarian.
Tavia Nyong'o
Tavia Nyong’o is a cultural critic and professor of African American studies, American studies, and theater studies at Yale University. He writes on art, music, politics, culture, and theory. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies, and a new book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, is forthcoming from NYU Press in the fall of 2018. Nyong’o has published in venues such as Radical History Review, Criticism, GLQ, TDR, Women & Performance, WSQ, The Nation, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and n+1. He is co-editor of the journal Social Text.
