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Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

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Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research

Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research

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.

ISBN-13: 9781479888443

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 11-27-2018

Pages: 280

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Series: Sexual Cultures #14

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University and the author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction: A Race against Time? 1

1 Critical Shade: The Angular Logics of Black Appearance 27

2 Crushed Black: On Archival Opacity 46

3 Brer Soul and the Mythic Being: Toward a Queer Logic of Dark Sense 76

4 Deep Time, Dark Time: Anarchaeologies of Blackness and Brownness 99

5 Little Monsters: Unsettling the Sovereign Wild 129

6 Fabulous, Formless: Queer Theory's Dark Precursor 151

7 Habeas Ficta: Afro-Fabulation and the Fictions of Ethnicity 166

8 Chore and Choice: The Depressed Cyborg's Manifesto 185

Conclusion: For a Critical Poetics of Afro-Fabulation 199

Acknowledgments 213

Notes 217

Index 255

About the Author 265