Queer Cuba
the second in the series Globally Queer? — a panel discussion with Jafari Allen, José Muñoz, & José Quiroga
Thursday, February 7
6 to 8 pm
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Jafari Allen, Anthropology and African American Studies, Yale University
“A Black/Queer Cuban: Here & There”
José Quiroga, Spanish, Emory University
“Unpacking My Files: Life as a ‘Brigadista'”
moderated by: José Muñoz, Performance Studies, New York University
This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.
For more information, please contact CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or call 212-992-9540.
Jafari Allen, jointly appointed with the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University, works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness — in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean. Dr. Allen’s critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2011], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis– most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans—to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, re-interpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” ¡Venceremos? argues that mutually constituting scenes in Havana and Santiago de Cuba– like semi-private, extra-legal parties of men who have sex with men; HIV education activism; lesbian performance and incipient organizing of women who have sex with women; hip-hop and la monia (US R&B/soul music) parties and concerts; sex labor; cigar “hustling”; and informal Black consciousness raising networks– represent a gravid space for becoming new revolutionary men and women, with new racial, gender and sexual subjectivities. His current research project, Black Queer Here and There: Movement and Sociality in the Americas, traces cultural and political circuits of transnational queer desire—in travel, tourism, (im)migration, art and activism.
José Quiroga was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Emory University, and has held visiting appointments at Columbia, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. His research interests are contemporary Latin American and Latino literatures and cultures, gender and queer studies, contemporary Cuba and the Caribbean, and Latin American poetry. His published books include Mapa Callejero (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010), Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2009), Cuban Palimpsests (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and, in collaboration with Daniel Balderston,Sexualidades en Disputa (Buenos Aires: Ricardo Rojas, 2005). In addition he has also published Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York University Press, 2001) and Understanding Octavio Paz (University of South Carolina Press, 2000). He is co-editor at Palgrave Macmillan of the book series New Directions in Latino American Cultures and has been a member of the Board at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in New York. He is presently completing an edited collection for Duke University Press titled The Havana Reader, and a book on dissident practices in Cuba and Argentina, for which he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year 2010-2011.
José Esteban Muñoz is Professor of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He teaches courses in comparative ethnic studies, queer theory and aesthetics. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Cruising Utopia: The Here and Now of Queer Futurity (2009) and the forthcoming The Sense of Brown. His edited and co-edited collections include the volumes Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, (1997) and special issues of the journals of Social Text (“Queer Transextions of Race, Gender, Nation, 1997 and “What’s Queer About Queer About Queer Studies Now,” 2005) and Women and Performance (“Queer Acts,” 1996 and “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project, 2009”). He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for NYU Press.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; the Department of Performance Studies; & the Program in Latino Studies.
