Impossible Desires: New Directions in Queer Diaspora Studies

Jordache A. Ellapen is an associate professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. A native from South Africa, Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black Studies scholar with expertise in the visual and performance art cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. Ellapen is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025). Indenture Aesthetics is the first academic monograph to examine South African Blackness and Afro-Indian intimacies through a queer studies framework. Prioritizing a radical African queer imaginary, the book re-activates Bantu Stephen Biko’s notion of Black Consciousness, as theory and method, to grapple with the entangled pasts, presents, and futures of South African Black and Afro-Indian communities. Ellapen is currently working on a book tentatively titled Black Pleasure Politics, which seeks to understand the aesthetic and political dimensions of pleasure. The project seeks to examine the significance pleasure holds for expanded understanding of Black freedom and politics. In 2022, Ellapen was the recipient of the Feminist Studies Journal Claire G. Moses Award for Most Theoretically Innovative article published in 2021 for “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Art Praxis.” In 2022 he was also the recipient of the Queer African Studies Association Award for best published essay by a junior scholar for “Performing Blackness as Transgressive Erotics: African Futurities and Black Queer Sex in South African Live Art.”

Suzanne C. Persard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, writer and curator, her research, teaching and curatorial practice center histories of gender and sexuality within archives of the indentured Indian diaspora; queer and feminist visual cultures; and theories of decoloniality. She was profiled by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center for her work as an activist and founding member of Jahajee Sisters, the first non-profit organization in the U.S. committed to ending gender-based violence within Indo-Caribbean communities. In 2023, she curated Remnants of Another at Twelve Gates in Philadelphia, convening Indo-Caribbean visual artists from Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname. She has served as an acquisitions advisor to the University of Pennsylvania Indo-Caribbean Collection. Her research appears in the following publications: Feminist Review; Journal of West Indian Literature; Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies; and Journal of Indian Indentureship and Its Legacies. Anthologized chapters are published in or forthcoming from Routledge (Routledge Companion to Gender and Feminist Studies in the Caribbean); Oxford University Press (Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis); and Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques.

Mehak Faisal Khan is an Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature in the English Department and in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and on the board of the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance series. She received her PhD in English and Critical Theory from UC Berkeley. Her current book project, Ajeeb Aesthetics, develops a theory of the strange, wondrous, queer, and uncanny, rooted in the aesthetic and affective categories of  contemporary Pakistani culture, as a site from which to rethink global aesthetics. She has been a Co-Chief Editor at Qui Parle, and is a founding editor of Tasavvur, the first pan-South Asian speculative fiction magazine.

Kareem Khubchandani is the author of the award-winning books Decolonize Drag and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. He is also co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, guest editor of Text and Performance Quarterly’s “Critical Aunty Studies,” and associate editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Kareem is Associate Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. His next book, Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties is forthcoming in November 2025.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) is a Los Angeles-based artist who works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. She works through counter-archives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of indigenous and localized knowledge within the context of Sufism.