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- Date: February 18, 2022
- Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
- Location: Classroom 421
Speakers
- Naomi Extra – Rutgers University, Newark (American Studies), Rutgers, New Brunswick (WGSS)
- Oliva R. Polk – Yale University, American and African American Studies
Moderator/s
- Kristen Owens, Associate Curator (Programs) – Paul Robeson Galleries, Express Newark
A “Different” Type of Black Feminist Writer: Literary Play in The Bars Across Heaven by Red Jordan Arobateau
Naomi Extra
In 1975, Red Jordan Arobateau self-published his first major literary work, The Bars Across Heaven, a novel of black queer working class romantic and sexual longing set against the backdrop of the summer of love and the nascent political energy of the Black Power movement. The Bars chronicles the story of Flip, a biracial butch lesbian who cruises the streets of San Francisco in search of love and sexual intimacy. Arobateau published the novel with virtually no fanfare from the mainstream literary world. As the scholar and fiction writer Ann Allen Shockley once noted, he was a “different” type of black feminist writer. His work was raunchy, sex-positive, and untethered to notions of black literary respectability. Unlike more well known black feminist writers of the period—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, and others—Arobateau blatantly disregarded conventions of grammar, form, and literary acceptability. Through both the sexually explicit content and the raw unedited presentation of the novel, Arobateau’s work offers a productive space for questioning or playing with what we think we know about the black feminist literary tradition and the ways in which it has been constructed.
As a form of black queer working class resistance, I imagine literary play as a mode of rupture and expanding possibilities in black feminist literature. In this paper, I explore the ways in which Arobateau’s novel, The Bars, plays with and poses a challenge to the black feminist literary tradition. I argue that soul music, black crime fiction, Black Power and feminism are riffed on, sampled, and challenged in ways that amplify working poor black queer sexual subjectivity. Ultimately, through the novel Arobateau offers new possibilities for thinking about and imagining the contours of the black feminist literary tradition and the African American literary canon.
Title: “‘We Can Be Anything We want to Be’: Tourmaline’s Black Femme Self-Fashioning, and the Ethics of Black Queer Historiography.”
Olivia R. Polk
When we think about how the black body is characterized in the discipline of history, most often we recall dynamics of abjection, forced labor, alienation, and violence. Many interdisciplinary historians of black history— including Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, Terra Hunter. This paper examines a series of works in black trans femme multimedia artist Tourmaline’s first solo exhibition “Pleasure Gardening,” which ran in the winter of 2021, as a means to interrogate the role play, leisure, and party might have in the alternative methodologies of a black trans feminist history. The works exhibited in “Pleasure Gardening,” including the film “Salacia” (2018), excavate archives of black people’s practices of making community, carving out spaces for leisure in public, and of radically self-fashioning in the context of 19th century policing of blackness, and the criminalization of gender self-determination that remains ongoing. I close read Tourmaline’s creative process in creating her films and the speculative-fictional photographs for its emphasis on turning to the archive to excavate moments of black queer and trans pleasure, and for its engagement with materials and figures present in her archives. Tourmaline’s practice models a form of intimacy with the subjects of history— like the black trans sex worker Mary Jones, or the residents of Seneca Village— that endeavors to make Tourmaline and the performers in her films co-present with them. I argue that this co-presence is achieved through an approach to cinematic performance and storytelling that ostensibly stages a kind of joyful convening— or party— between black queer ancestors and black queers in the present. Ultimately, this paper works to position this work as a methodology for making history that might be characterized as black trans* feminist, and suggests that this methodology of trans-historical intimacy is a ground from which to theorize a black trans* femme ethics, for which the practice of the party might be a crucial part.
The Trade Which is Not One: Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s Queer of Color Aesthetics
Jamal Batts
This paper reads black queer nonbinary painter Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s portraits Trade bois around the corner (2019) and 2 Trade Bois (2019) in order to question how black queer studies, queer of color critique, and black queer artists construct notions of risk through the figure of trade. Once a queer colloquialism for assumedly straight men who “trade” same-sex sexual favors for money, the term trade has morphed into a catchall for the stylization or performance of working class black and Latino masculinity presented within and outside of queer communities. Queers of color, in scholarly and trade press publications, have warned about the hazards of having an “obsession” or liaisons with trade, citing the deathly consequences of cross-class sex amongst black and Latino gay men. Resisting the urge to reify the figure of trade, I turn to Chase’s erotic and vulnerable paintings, which feature black masculine figures fading into one another with seemingly interchangeable and detached erogenous zones. These works highlight the ways in which black queers play with the figure of trade, reflecting how this pathologized social construction refuses to hold a singular meaning. I argue that Chase (as well as poets jay dodd and Danez Smith) employ what I term “trade prosthetics,” or the erotic play and rearrangement of risky images and signifiers of black masculinity as a form of counterintuitive and pleasurable world-making.
Manifestations on the Playground: Sublimated Queerness as Play and Mischief in Black Childhood (or the Bildungsroman)
Zeus Sumra
Queerness, traditionally, in Black literature, is rarely expressed overtly. Examining three significant works of literature that capture experiences of Black childhood, mischief can be seen as an outlet to channel unacceptable expressions of queerness: Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John; Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah”; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Apollo.” In each of these works of literature, queerness is often present in the homosocial interactions of Black children, but sometimes coded as either or both “play” and “mischief.”
Central to this paper are the ways in which the characters express their sexualities to others. More specifically, emphasis will be placed on how they relate to their love interests. In the case of Adichie’s “Apollo” and Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” unrequited love/attraction is central to the experiences of the characters. Another form of rejection comes from the wider society. Along these lines, this paper will closely follow how these young characters respond to these varied forms of rejection through play. For example, in Adichie’s short story, the main character, Okenwa, uses karate as a socially acceptable interaction with his houseboy, Raphael. Later, this same playful act puts an end to Okenwa and Raphael’s friendship.
The paper will also briefly touch on works that feature queerness in adulthood: Nella Larsen’s Passing and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. In both novels, sublimated queerness, or homosocial relations with queer undertones, go further than mischief; it turns violent and deadly. The characters’ difficulty in expressing their truest selves, rooted in their respective childhoods, can be seen as a catalyst for tragedy.