Afro-fabulations : the queer drama of black life /
Tavia Nyong'o.
- New York : New York University Press, (c)2019.
- 1 online resource (ix, 265 pages) : illustrations
- Sexual cultures .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: a race against time? -- Critical shade -- Crushed black -- Brer soul and the mythic being -- Deep time, dark time -- Little monsters -- Womb of shadows -- Habeas ficta -- Chore and choice -- Conclusion: for a critical poetics of Afro-fabulation.
Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong'o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960's and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as "angular sociality," drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life
9781479806386
American drama--African American authors--History and criticism. African Americans in the performing arts. Gays in the performing arts--United States. Homosexuality in the theater--United States.