“This Is Messy! You Are Messy! Your Brain Is Broke!” Zola, Queer Interracial Desire, and the Absurdity of White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy

This article takes up Black/white interraciality as a queer form of desire and as an object of state and interpersonal surveillance. Rejecting the conscription of interraciality into the larger, overlapping projects of anti-black surveillance, “knowability,” sexual normativity, coupling, and state regulation of desire, this project instead asks after the possibilities of interraciality when visuality and biopolitics are decentered, and when we make space for its full sensorial dimensions. Accordingly, I examine Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2021) to consider how the soundscapes of interraciality materialize in unconventional ways through the genre-specific potentialities of tragicomedy. I argue that Zola employs dark humor and critical questioning to frame listeners’ interpretation of the absurdity and dangers of whiteness, misogynoir, and toxic masculinity. I suggest that Zola’s counter-narrative, or re-visiting of the events through participatory storytelling, asks us to attune ourselves to the ways that the sensorium can be recruited both in service of oppression and in service of liberation, and argue that Bravo animates Zola’s survival through the senses of sound and touch.