Contingent Emplacements: Black Queer Diaspora(s) and the “Transnational” Turn in American (Cultural) Studies

Christopher Smith, doctoral candidate, OISE / University of Toronto

Keywords: queer diaspora, affect, interdisciplinary studies, blackness, queerness, theory

As a culmination of various interdisciplinary interventions, a growing body of scholarship has emerged under the rubric of “queer diaspora” (Gopinath, 2005). Intended as an interrogation of the concomitant relationship between processes of migration, sexual citizenship and belonging this intervention offers greater insight into the disciplinary constraints of nation-based fields of study, by centering the processes of social subjects rendered as “marginal” - the black, the queer, the migrant and so forth. With this context in mind, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, frames the arrival of black/queer/diaspora (as a field) as a “conjunctural” moment, that perhaps underscores the current limits of Black, Queer & Diaspora Studies that has been brought about by ongoing debates from within (Allen, 2012). Cultural Studies with its commitment to interdisciplinary practices has certainly shaped the trajectory of these debates by offering alternative hermeneutics for rendering socio-cultural landscapes.

Given this context, this presentation considers the recent trend towards an inventory of “identity knowledges” (Weigman, 2012) or more aptly what Roderick Ferguson terms the “interdisciplines” (Ferguson, 2012) to assess what is at stake when such fields are called upon to re-establish their utility by re-consolidating an essential or “core” social subject of analysis? Through a critique of Sharon Patricia Holland’s recent assessment that the transnationalization of American Cultural Studies risks negating the particularity of black life, and the quotidian manner in which racism manifests itself in the realm of knowledge production; this paper asks where and under what parameters does one render the black-queer-diasporic subject? Further, if such an assessment perhaps rests on a false dichotomy of particularity vs. differentiation, how does one account for the manner in which the bodily, affective and ephemeral exchanges of black-queer-subjects who augment the tenor of local struggles and concerns?

Selected Bibliography

Allen, Jafari Sinclaire. “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2012) 18(2-3): 211-248

Ferguson, Roderick. The Re-Order of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesotta Press, 2012

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press 2005

Holland, Sharon Patricia.The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012

Weigman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012

Dispersions of a Queer Kind

Dina Georgis, University of Toronto

Keywords: queer, affect, race, perversion, loss, the sexual, psychoanalysis, subjectivity

This paper defines “queer” not simply in terms of sexual orientation but the affects/perversions and dispersions of the sexual, not easily demarcated into categories of sexuality, gender, and race. In this vein, I ask: Might we think of queer as the affect of loss and difference that returns in the everyday experience of the monstrous, the perverse, and the ugly? Queer could be understood as the traces of sexual being that resist the domestication of the sexual for social recognition, the parts that refuse to be colonized into affable, upright subjects.

Though my rendition of queer is not culturally defined, it also does not exist outside it. As affective psychic trace, the queerly sexual interacts with culture when it returns in collective symbolizations and identity formations, but they do not subsume it. An examination of Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles the coming of age of a Moroccan boy, will elucidate a queerness that is not easily contained. Set in both Morocco and, Taïa’s protagonist is neither clearly a victim or oppressed by the socio-economic and patriarchal conditions of his existence. His sexuality is naive and perverse, exploited and exploitative. Queer knowledge in this film breaks down at many levels. The effect of this confusion is a resistance to give his sexual subjectivity a known trajectory. Though his sexuality is mediated by brutal social contexts, it is also utterly in excess of it. In Salvation Army the protagonist grows up to be gay, as we have come to understand this word, but his subjectivity remains enigmatic, contradictory, monstrous and in process.

Global Interconnectedness and Precarity in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Eleanor Ty, Wilfrid Laurier University

Keywords: failure, precarity, Asian-American literature, witnessing, environment, debris

The defining event in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, is the tsunami which struck Japan in March 11, 2011, causing extensive damage, claiming nearly 16,000 lives and injuring 6,000 others. Though the tsunami is not represented in great detail in the novel, which is set in Canada and Japan, it is the means by which two very different women become connected -- a middle-aged Asian American writer who lives on an island in British Columbia, and a teenager from Tokyo.

Like her first novel, My Year of Meats, A Tale for the Time Being juxtaposes the lives of two female characters to reveal the richness and interconnectedness of our “universe of many worlds” (Time Being 400). Weaving together the “tales” of Ruth and Nao through a postmodern “metafictional” narrative (Hutcheon 1), Ozeki attempts to grapple with a number of pressing issues in contemporary society: global warming and environmental pollution; bullying of youths; the consequences of the dot.com bubble; aging, memory, and Alzheimer’s; porn and sex work; conceptions of time and historiography. Nao’s diary which is found by Ruth on a beach in Canada provides the intradiegetic text which brings to life Akihabara, cosplay, manga and other Japanese subcultures to North American readers. Ruth and Nao’s narratives reverse the traditional divide of Old vs. New World, by locating Asia, rather than America, as the hub of excitement and a place to be discovered.

My paper explores the ways in which Ozeki plays with the connectedness of geographical space as well as the way she illustrates global economic and social uncertainty or “precarity” and “cruel optimism” in today’s society (Berlant 192, 24). Berlant defines “cruel optimism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic…. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). Berlant observes, “The fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (3). In A Tale for the Time Being, the tsunami, the fascination with death and suicides of Nao and her father, the numerous instances of reversals and quick changes in circumstances present a world of precarity that can only be balanced by time, by those who seek enlightenment, and the comfort of the writerly imagination.

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.

Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. New York: Viking, 1998.

---. A Tale for the Time Being. New York & Toronto: Viking, 2013

Unruly Complicities: Race, Gender and the Making of FetishNationalism

Amar Wahab, assistant professor, Founders College

Keywords: fetish, homonormativity, homonationalism, Islamophobia

Recent studies of homonormativity and homonationalism have challenged and problematized queer political projects by emphasizing the complicated intersections of race, sexuality and citizenship in the public sphere. My presentation will extend this focus through an analysis of the rebranding of Toronto’s Church Street Fetish Fair as a ‘family friendly’ Village Fair (2011). I will analyze online news articles and blog threads responding to the rebranding with a view to understanding fetish counter-public discourse as refusing hetero and homonormative censorship of public sex, sexuality and erotic life. To complicate this reading, I will analyze the rebranding debate to investigate how the figure of the ‘veiled, Muslim/Arab’ woman is spectacularized as the limit against which counter-public claims to citizenship are made. While it is possible to think of the Fetish Fair as a counter-public event that repudiates neoliberal demands for good citizenship, this analysis questions whether the transgressive claims of queer counter-publicity disrupt or help to further cultivate homonationalist projects.