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

A groundbreaking collection of sixteen essays that examines the productive intersection of the fields of black and queer studies

About the Author

E. Patrick Johnson is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, also published by Duke University Press

Mae G. Henderson is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the editor of Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies and coeditor of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817-1871.

Reviews
"Black Queer Studies makes a dynamic contribution to the shifting landscape of queer studies. This volume will surely transform our understandings of both black studies and queer studies, and it will create new idioms for the analysis and theorization of race and sexuality. Black Queer Studies is necessary and long overdue."-Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity
"There are moments of epistemological excitement that recognize changes already ongoing, and then there are moments that at the same time both recognize and generate new ways of knowing. The creation of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology is such a moment. It changes our horizons of thought. I'm excited about its effect on my thinking and grateful to the contributors and editors for the boundary stretching."-Wahneema Lubiano, editor of The House That Race Built
"This fine collection of essays demonstrates the importance of black queer quests and questions."-Jennifer DeVere Brody, author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture
"Cogent, dealing well with some of the race/gender topics addressed intelligently in studies such as William Hawkeswood's One of the Children (1996) and Roderick Ferguson's Aberrations in Black (2004). Recommended." -- R B Shuman * Choice *
"Insightful. . . . From the racial segregation that can occur in gay neighborhoods to current debates about the depiction of black gays and lesbians in film, many of the essays pursue important questions about sexual and racial identity. . . . Each of these essays feels more like a prayer, a kind you'd hope to hear in church: a calm and quiet attempt to speak to the complex fears and thoughts that trouble all our hearts." -- Quinn Eli * News & Observer *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822336181
Author E. Patrick Johnson
Format Paperback
Page Count 400
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 590g