E. Patrick Johnson

Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project. The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies. Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace

The specter of the black fag: Parody, blackness, and hetero/homosexual b(r)others

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the ways in which three African American heterosexual males-Eddie Murphy, Damon Wayans, and David Alan Grier-appropriate signifiers of gayness to parody, stereotype, and repudiate black gay men. These performances are also attempts to circumscribe the boundaries of blackness, ultimately suggesting that “authentic” blackness is lodged within hegemonic black masculinity. Contrary to this desired effect, the essay demonstrates how these performers, in the act of repudiation, ironically and unwittingly queer heteronormative black masculinity, securing further the dialectic between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Finally, the essay argues that these performances manifest the black heterosexual males melancholia, his refusal to grieve the loss of his sexual B(r)other.

SNAP! Culture: A Different Kind of Reading

The nonverbal art form known as “snapping,” has become a recognizable signifier within popular discourse. African‐American gay men and African‐American women in particular are two groups who lay claim to this performative gesture and who, in many ways, have set forth aesthetic criteria by which to measure its effectiveness. Situated within the context of popular culture, however, snapping as a discursive practice becomes a contested signifier as various groups struggle over ownership, use, and meaning. Snapping, through its association with camp, also problematizes the notion of camp performance as transgressive. This study describes how certain groups define, use, appropriate, and reappropriate snapping as a communicative act and how shifts in cultural, social, and popular contexts significantly alter not only its function but also how it is performed and interpreted.

Race, ethnicity, and performance a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly

The recent insurgence of publications and public debates on the “performativity” of race and ethnicity warrants this special issue. Over the last decade literary and cultural studies scholars have deployed performance as a trope to theorize the instability of identity formation, especially with regard to gender and sexuality. That theoretical paradigm has expanded to include race and ethnicity as the academy has witnessed the emergence of “whiteness” studies in addition to an even keener awareness of performance and identity in more established disciplinary programs in African American Studies, Latino/a Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American Studies and the less formalized Irish and Jewish Studies. These race- and ethnic-based disciplines engage various methodologies to theorize racial and ethnic cultural production. In many instances, race and ethnicity scholars find performance to be a powerful methodology to critically engage their objects of intellectual inquiry.

In Search of My Queer Fathers (In Response to Bishop Eddie Long)

This poetic meditation engages homosexuality as pathology and inherited “disease” as propagated by some factions of the Black church. Reinterpreting the notion of genealogical “inheritance” the author pays tribute to his queer ancestors, tracing a legacy of racial and sexual struggle and how the two are imbricated. At the same time, the meditation points to the hypocrisy of Black clergy who always already carry within them a part of the Black queer.

From Page to Stage: The Making of Sweet Tea

Like so many of my generation and earlier, my introduction to what is now known as ‘‘performance studies’’ was through ‘‘oral interpretation.’’ But oral interpretation was not a new concept to me when I entered college. Growing up in a community of oracles who demanded that we children memorize and recite the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks*among others* taught me early on the value of literature and orature*particularly within the black aesthetic. What oral interpretation did, then, was formalize into an academic methodology what I had been doing as part of my ‘‘cultural’’ training. Drawing on the literary properties of poetry and the narrative conventions of fiction to bring literature to life on the stage provided a blueprint for how to mine texts for their performative possibilities. As the field morphed into ‘‘Performance Studies’’ and the objects of study expanded to include ethnographic texts, the foundation*the attention to details*that oral interpretation provided never faded. In fact, there was a way in which the tools in my oral interpretation toolbox became sharper. Thus, my dissertation on my grandmother’s oral history as a domestic worker required that I read not only her words as transcribed, but also her words as performed through her body. In other words, my training in oral interpretation sharpened my critical and analytical eye as an ethnographer witnessing oral history performance. The semiotics of embodied history was discernible through the critical eye of interpretation. When I began collecting the oral histories for my book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South*An Oral History, a performance was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in creating an archive of life stories heretofore undocumented. It was not until after a year into the research and after meeting so many great storytellers that I realized that a performance was in order. For the page could not capture the vocal cadence, verbal ticks, nonverbal cues, and intimacy created through oral history performance. Initially, I considered adapting a script from the oral histories and casting a show of eight to twelve actors. After more thought, however, I decided not

Border Intellectual: Performing Identity at the Crossroads

In this chapter, I employ what might be called “autobiographical criticism” in order to “point to the dangers of framing/bounding/containing by challenging the ways in which identities are categorized.”1 Thus, this chapter takes up the topic of performance in the borderlands from the perspective of autobiography in order to grapple with larger questions of identity politics and belonging in both the academy and the various communities in which I have lived. Based on my experiences in each of these highly contested and politicized spaces, I describe the process of trying to negotiate the politics of the academy on the one hand, and staying true to my roots/routes on the other. What I discover, however, is that none of these spaces is wholly nurturing or wholly discouraging; rather, they are liminal spaces that require agents within them to simultaneously conform to and transgress the temporal boundaries and borders that enclose them and the politics that emerge therein. It is within this process that one’s performance of identity gets swept up in the vortex of identity politics, which can be emotionally, psychologically, professionally, and culturally frustrating.