Professor Jafari Allen - A Narrative From the Middle, For The First Time: Black Nations?/Queer Nations? in the Long 1980s
Thursday, March 24, 2016 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Presenter(s): Jafari S Allen
Location: UA Center for Creative Photography (1030 N. Olive Road)
Reception immediately following on the patio of College of Architecture + Planning + Landscape Architecture (1040 N. Olive Road)
A translocal Black/queer public sphere began to emerge during the long 1980s, finding its apogee of political and cultural expression during the 1990s. These ideas were first made explicit at the 1995 Black Nations/ Queer Nations?’ conference in New York City. Here we track a few of the moves of the larger formation out of which the conference, and Black/queer here and there emerge-- exploring of some of the ways activists, artists, pornographers, filmmakers, dj’s, drag queens, and impresarios, for example, made sense of the upheavals that the global losses of 1970s revolutions, and the settling in of neoliberalism, Thatcherism/Reaganism, and AIDS, had wrought.
Jafari S Allen is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology, and founder of the Miami Initiative on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, at the University of Miami. Formerly Associate Professor of African American Studies, and Anthropology; and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program Director of Graduate Studies, at Yale University, Allen’s scholarship and teaching has opened new lines of inquiry and offered re-invigorated methods of narrative theorizing in anthropology, Black diaspora studies, and feminist and queer studies. Allen is the author of ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-‐Making in Cuba; editor of Black/Queer/Diaspora; and a number of other publications in, for example: American Ethnologist; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Current Anthropology; and Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform of Criticism; Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Engaged in ethnographic research in Cuba and the Caribbean for seventeen years, he has transnational research interests in a number of other sites in the Americas. Recent research has also taken him to East Africa and Western Europe. Professor Allen is currently finishing his second book (Black/Queer Here & There: An Ethnography of an Idea), and beginning research on a third monograph, Structural Adjustments: Black Survival in the 1980s.
Jafari S. Allen will also be a speaker in our Deep Dish Lunchtime Speaker Series on Thursday at Noon. More information here.