This Periscope contains a series of reflections on Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. At times meditating on the book’s theoretical and stylistic maneuvers, at others extending its theories to new contexts and questions, the six contributors to this collection tarry with “the powers of the false” as a modality of black queer study (19). Thanks to Jayna Brown, Leon Hilton, Sampada Aranke, Malik Gaines, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Monica L. Miller for their contributions to this dossier, and to Marie Buck and Anna McCarthy for their feedback and support. For more on the cover image, which comes from Tourmaline’s Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (2017), see the dossier introduction. (Still by Alex Pittman).
Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the university today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of Truth, or the Truth as Subject. Readers of this introduction will likely recognize the epigraph above … Continue reading “Introduction: Can the Subaltern Fabulate?”
Years ago, at a conference, Tavia and I talked about what to do in our responses to the theoretical turn to negativity in black studies. The sound of this turn was roaring all around us, and we had to shout … Continue reading “In Our Dark Times”
“I have a right to show my color, darling! I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!” The opening pages of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life summon the specter of Crystal Labeija. In a now-iconic scene from the … Continue reading “Afro-Fabulating in the Shadows”
What does it feel like to describe an appearance that hasn’t quite come into being? To conjure a sensation at the edges of haptic awareness? To make a case for a time yet to announce itself as present and always … Continue reading “Dark Descriptions of Black Appearance”
Film plays an important role in Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life and offers a kind of historical starting point in the 60s and 70s for the contemporary span this book covers. Nyong’o introduces his project via … Continue reading “A Dark Cinema”
Blackness is both elastic and not. Blackness is ascribed to many who can trace ancestry to the African diaspora, a relation that has been determined by the transatlantic slave trade. Here, blackness is tethered explicitly to people and their lives. … Continue reading “Blackness, the Virtual, and the Work of Fabulation”
I. There are some things that seem too volatile to be touched, that confound consideration. Moments, that when they appear, time opens up, reaches across space, prods, squeezes, cathecting pain and pleasure. These moments pivot between fragility and indestructibility and … Continue reading “On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Black (Diasporic/Nordic) Arts”
