Queer of Color Critique in a Moment of Danger

Chandan Reddy: This feels like a paradoxical moment—we have, on the one hand, the increasing institutionalization of "queer of color critiques," however uneven, and on the other hand, its ongoing targeting by right-wing and fascist social elements as outside the pale of legitimate social consciousness and educational endeavors. I'd like to begin by inviting each of you to reflect on the political and intellectual genealogies that informed your early work on queer of color critiques, particularly against its institutionalization and its caricature by right-wing state censors.Roderick Ferguson: In terms of genealogies, I love telling the story about how a few of us were having dinner in San Diego in 1999. Martin Manalansan came to University of California, San Diego, and gave a talk related to his essay from the anthology The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (1997) that Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd put together. The essay, "In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma," was one of the first pieces we have concerning a global critique of homonormativity. We didn't even really have that category at the time, but Martin was doing that work. After his talk, we were sitting around—it was me, Chandan, and Gayatri, who was a postdoc at the time. Chandan and I were finishing up our dissertations—me at UC San Diego, Chandan at Columbia. Jack Halberstam was still at UC San Diego then. And I forget who it was. It might have been Chandan, but after dinner he said, "I think the next step in queer studies should be around political economy," by which he meant not political economy in the sort of classical Marxist sense, where you just apply class and you're done, but what everyone understood in the moment as a question of "what would an intersectional, queer critique of political economy look like?" That was also a kind of renovation of the Birmingham school of cultural studies, and right around that time we had a writing group that several of us were in: Gayatri, Chandan, Grace Hong, Danny Weidner, Victor Viesca, Victor Bascara, and Ruby Tapia. In fact, we named it Ruby's Reading Group, because Ruby came up with the idea for it. We all had a sense that we would intervene in our various disciplinary targets, whether it be Asian American studies, Black studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies. We would intervene through, you know, this sort of intersectional engagement with political economy, but we also had to be "fluent in each other's narratives," to use M. Jacqui Alexander's (2005) phrasing. It was important for us to know each other's idioms.I remember there was a reading/writing group meeting when Gayatri was about to start at UC Davis, and she was asked to teach the Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies course. But she didn't want to do it in the way it had been done up till then, which was to start with psychoanalysis and Havelock Ellis and move through the feminist psychoanalytic discussion of the eighties and nineties. Gayatri said in that meeting, "I think I want to begin with anthropology, because that would capture anthropology as a sexual discourse and a colonial discourse and also a way of apprehending South Asian sexualities." I remember that moment and I thought, "right, that's what I should do with sociology!" Gayatri's idiom around anthropology clarified what I wanted to do with sociology as a racial, sexual, and gendered discourse. This is also the moment where Chandan was coming off of being the first board cochair of the Audre Lorde Project with Cathy Cohen. Many folks were also involved in the University of California union struggle. There was also the affirmative action struggle in California that became a kind of litmus for affirmative action rhetoric around the country. We were all involved in those struggles. So it was very much born out of certain interventions and urgencies not only in the academy but also within social movements.Martin Manalansan: I really appreciate Rod's vignette about that dinner at which folks discussed some of the questions out of which queer of color critique developed. I was a grad student at a non-elite school, at the University of Rochester. And I presented at a conference there that included Lisa Lowe and Jack Halberstam. I was doing AIDS work at the time, working at an AIDS organization, which I did for ten years, because I hadn't finished my dissertation. And they encouraged me and mentored me. I eventually finished my dissertation in 1997, when my department said I was in jeopardy of being kicked out if I didn't. I thank Chandan, who is moderating this panel, Rod and Gayatri, Lisa and Jack, and all these other people who are now part of my academic community who took me in—this guy from upstate New York who had no credentials. Even after my advisor told me that I'd never get a job in anthropology, this community took me in. It was literally like being adopted by an illustrious family.Gayatri Gopinath: To build on Martin's discussion about one's adopted intellectual community, my first book, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, came out in 2005. And I quite literally could not have written it without the work of every single one of the people in this roundtable discussion. Juana María Rodríguez read every word of my manuscript, even before she was my colleague at UC Davis. That was around 2002. Martin and I have been in conversation since 1994. Chandan and I were grad students together at Columbia in English and comparative literature in the early nineties, which is how I actually got to know Rod and the intellectual community at UCSD at the time. I sort of got adopted into this incredible community at UC San Diego because Columbia was a very toxic place to do queer work, to do the kind of queer interdisciplinary work that we were all interested in doing. There was really no place for that, despite the fact that I had a very supportive dissertation chair in Rob Nixon. Just to give you a little anecdote, I was told that if I put queer in the title of my dissertation, I would not get a job and that I should not do that. And in fact, what I should do is write a straightforward postcolonial literary dissertation that had a chapter on Salman Rushdie, preferably on Midnight's Children. And I thought, "I'm going to die, like I can't." Impossible Desires came out of the dissertation I ended up writing, which in turn came out of the kind of organizing and activism that Chandan, Martin, and I were all involved with in New York City from the mid- to late 1990s. But it was really through the intellectual cohort at San Diego and the mentoring I received from Lisa, Jack, and Rosemary George, who's not with us any longer, that I felt powerful enough to actually write this book. So to all of the grad students in the room, I would say, "Find that adopted intellectual community that allows you to do what you know you want to do—what you're compelled to do."It's through Chandan that I met Jack and Lisa, who became my mentor and advisor, respectively. That community really allowed me to write that book.Kara Keeling: This is really exciting for me. And it's a little bit surprising, too, because I never really positioned myself in queer color critique as a sort of formation. After hearing Rod talk, I'm remembering that I actually applied to UC San Diego for grad school around that moment. I ended up going to the University of Pittsburgh, and so I got my MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, which at that time was a place that was trying to rethink the discipline of English. Film studies was in the English department, and my PhD was actually in critical and cultural studies. So, I was reading a lot of critical theory. Most of the classes that I took were taught by the film scholars, Marcia Landy and Colin McCabe, or the literary theorists, Paul Bové, or R. A. Judy, who just wrote what I think is a magisterial book called Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020). And it's worth mentioning here, too, that I was a student in what I believe was the first graduate course that was ever offered in queer theory at the University of Pittsburgh, which was taught by the late Professor Eric O. Clark. So what I think is interesting is that I was working in film studies and literature and critical theory. I didn't know any of these folks on the panel until later.I came to graduate school with a keen interest in the histories of Black radicalism and Black struggle. It's interesting because, you know, if you can think about the 1980s being a kind of backlash against or recuperation of some of the things in the 1960s, I think there's a way of thinking about today as a kind of revanchist moment or attempt to recuperate what was unleashed or accomplished in the 1990s and early 2000s. And so in grad school I was really interested in the 1960s and in Black Power and Black radicalism. This proved to be important to me, because when I started graduate school it seemed like all of that radicalism had been tamed, but it was not tamed in popular culture at all. Popular culture was where we heard and experienced and saw these kinds of references to and understandings of Black radicalism or histories of Black radicalism. Uncovering these "popular" histories became really important to me.When I was a graduate student, I was also involved on a local and eventually on a national level with queer activism and Black queer organizations. But I actually met Chandan through this work. This is how I entered into the set of intellectual relationships and friendships that Rod described. Chandan and I were on a panel at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Forces (NGLTF) conference, "Creating Change," in 1999. So it wasn't an academic panel. And, I met Chandan. Jack Halberstam was there, and it was through Chandan that I met Grace Hong and Rod. But it's interesting to think about the way that the political context and the kind of activist work that we were doing were also a part of what was stitching these ideas together.CR: Thank you for those thoughtful reflections and recollections on the conditions in grad school for doing queer of color work in the 1990s and how that shaped your intellectual community. I wonder if we might build on Kara's remarks about how we are seeing a backlash today against certain formations of radicalism, especially after the outpouring of support for the Movement for Black Lives in 2020. As you think about today's backlashes, can you share with us some of the formations that you built upon and sought perhaps to extend?RF: So, like Gayatri and others on this panel, I turned my dissertation into the book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2003). And I think the part that's most germane for this panel is the conclusion of that book, where I, using M. Jacqui Alexander's work and Cathy Cohen's work, wanted to think about what I was observing in terms of global social formations at that time. There was (1) a sort of proliferation of modes of difference that are talking about race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections among minoritized subjects who were claiming visibility and voice, and (2) at the same time, the regulation of those formations. In my second book, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012), I wanted to deal squarely with that: how are regulatory apparatuses responding to the claims to visibility of the former bastards of empire? And what does it mean to then take that emergence of the sort of insurgent bastards as also part of the history of the interdisciplinary formations? You know that the interdisciplines are coming of age at the very same moment, and it's not as if power isn't paying attention. Power is, in fact, paying attention to these insurgencies, and sometimes goes the route of repression, but it also goes the route of saying, "Yes," a hegemonic affirmation as its mode of offense. I think my most recent book, One-Dimensional Queer (2018), continues to think through hegemonic affirmation and what gets obscured or suppressed.GG: In Impossible Desires I sought to theorize queer diaspora as a kind of two-pronged critique: first as a critique of the white normativity and Eurocentrism of queer studies, and second, as a critique of the heteronormativity of postcolonial studies. I think we can say that that project has been accomplished!Jesting aside, if we take stock of even just the work of everyone on this panel, and the work of all of the people who I see in this room, I think we've actually shifted the critical terrain, which is a real achievement. I remember in fall 2012, I taught what would be my last cotaught seminar with José Esteban Muñoz. It was a graduate seminar called "The Good Life," based on Lauren Berlant's discussion of that concept. We were reading an early piece of José's work on displacing the whiteness of queer studies. And I remember us looking at each other and thinking, you know, we've done that. We've actually dislodged that whiteness as the context for queer inquiry. In fact, speaking to the grad students here, one can do work now and do it in a way that wasn't possible twenty years ago. I think it's important for us to mark the victories and the successes we've had in shifting critique.To return, Impossible Desires was finished in the direct aftermath of 9/11. I was writing it right around the time of the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, India, in 2002 by Hindu nationalists. I was articulating queer diaspora and queer diasporic cultural practices as a kind of direct repudiation of toxic nationalisms, both in South Asia and in the United States. I really saw queer diaspora as a kind of antithesis to dominant state and diasporic nationalisms. I ended the book by gesturing to the ways in which a new homonormative cosmopolitan gay identity was being mobilized to signal a certain kind of modernity in India and the diaspora. I was borrowing from Martin's work here around the kind of burgeoning homo normativity at work, and in subsequent years we've seen really powerful critiques of this kind of recruitment of gay identity into the project of nationalism. Work, of course, by David Eng and Jasbir Puar, just to name a couple of thinkers. I want to include Chandan Reddy's work Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (2011), where he names the ways in which the so-called protection of sexual and racial minorities through, for instance, hate crimes legislation serves, in fact, to justify ongoing state violence that masquerades under the sign of freedom. That critique resonates so powerfully in this current moment because, of course, that's what we saw happen during 9/11, and now we see it happening again, right? We see the weaponization of gay, trans, and women's rights as a justification for colonial violence. We see that happening as we speak. We're in this very contradictory time, as both Chandan and Martin have framed it in this panel, where queerness is once again being framed as antinational, as outside the boundaries of national belonging, even as it's being recruited into nationalist projects. We have recent rulings by the Indian Supreme Court against gay marriage, the global Right's vilification of so-called gender ideology from the United States to Latin America to Eastern Europe. So it is this very contradictory terrain that we find ourselves in. I'm reminded of Michel Foucault's dictum that sexuality is that which has the greatest instrumentality! It's being used and mobilized in all of these different ways. But even within this contradictory terrain, I want to hold on to the potential of queer cultural practices and especially queer diasporic cultural practices to open up a space of critique, of refusal, of recalcitrance, and also of reorientation, of a way of seeing and sensing differently. So, this is what I was trying to get at in Impossible Desires. And it's also what motivates my second book, Unruly Visions (2018).KK: Let me start by giving a shout-out here to Black queer studies, because one of the things that was important to me was the Black Queer Studies conference that E. Patrick Johnson (and Patrick's here in the audience) and Mae G. Henderson organized at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2000. And it's interesting to think about these two formations in relation to each other, because a lot of people whose names come to mind when we think about queer color critique are also part of Black queer studies.As Gayatri mentioned, we cannot forget that trans and queer people are in the cross-hairs of right-wing governments and activists globally right now. Importantly, I think Black studies are in a position to reinvigorate the long history of Black internationalism in global political struggle, of which African Americans were a part. And I believe that this is a crucially important thing to do right now because Black political culture is much more allied with queer and trans issues and struggles than at any time in the past.Last, I'll just quickly say, there are important conversations to be had around what the recent, quite possibly short-lived, institutional legitimacy of queer of color critique has done and is doing to the kinds of work that we do and the ways that we work. So I think that tension between the institutionalization of something like "queer of color critique" and the kinds of things that we thought ourselves to be doing in a certain moment—that's worth thinking more about.MM: Yes, that's really helpful, Kara. You know, I appreciated rereading my first book, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003), in preparation for this panel. When people ask me what that book is about—and perhaps this is an example of the kind of power and institutionalization you are pointing to—I say it's about Filipino gay immigrants, migration and sexuality, and other forms of "homosexual" identities and categories. There's a chapter where I talk about a small studio apartment, whose interiors mimic the tortured path of a Filipino "gay" man: the tortured path of migration, where there were two corners, one that had a religious, Catholic altar, with statues and crucifixes on the one end, and the other, opposite corner of the wall that was filled with pictures of naked men. To him, as he moved around the room it signaled the ways in which he had to negotiate or, as he said, "sashay" through the tensions between these two proximate spaces in his everyday life.I realize now that while my work has always focused on queer, mostly working-class immigrants of color in New York City, an angle that I found in rereading the book is that my work has perhaps just as if not more importantly always been grounded in small, restrictive domestic spaces with tenuous proximities to others and to other moral worlds that are not always pleasant or necessarily warmly intimate. I can say that my two books—Global Divas and my forthcoming book called Queer Dwellings—are partly about the discomfort of working-class immigrant apartments in New York City.The people I profile in both books live in extremely dense "residential" units filled with immigrants who are working class and mostly undocumented. These "residences" are what the New York Times (Stewart et al. 2019) called "sunless worlds" because they are often converted basements and even first floors that actually face the building or have no windows. So across my work, instead of merely seeking to bring into academic visibility other forms of "homosexual" identities or categories, it is these dimly lit domiciles that I've been interested in: messy, dark, dingy, if you will, and cramped. These sun-deprived spaces. (Oh, I didn't think about this meaning of "sunshine" when I proposed the panel!) I realized these so-called sunless worlds, the sun-deprived apartments are inhabited by more people than what's allowed by law or city ordinances or by what can be seen from the street.These spaces are composed of an arrangement that is a nonnormative census household. Their "domesticity" is pathologized. Indeed, during the height of the COVID pandemic there were reports about all these immigrant households being so cramped that social distancing became impossible. These "households" became demonized because they were in Jackson Heights, or Elmhurst, etcetera—where the city's service labor comes from—the so-called ground zero for the spread of the pandemic in the city. As I try to understand this notion of nonnormativity in my forthcoming book, I focus literally the whole book on a single cramped apartment inhabited by six unrelated queer undocumented immigrants in Jackson Heights, New York.CR: Martin, your reflections prompt me to ask Kara, Gayatri, and Rod to share what kinds of questions or practices they pursued under the heading of "queer of color," "queer diaspora," or Black queer studies in their work.KK: I can start. My first book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (2007), was also, like Rod's, my dissertation, and part of it addresses questions I grappled with in grad school. I was in film studies during the "height" of the struggles over multiculturalism. At the time, I was asking: why are visibility and representation assumed to be desirable achievements? How does our participation in social and economic systems and modes of communication shape our perceptions of and assumptions about what is possible? I remember in graduate seminars, conversations, and lectures on campus, I kept hearing people say, "I just want to make visible X, or Y, and I would sit there and think to myself, "And what would that do?"I started working on the material included in my second book, Queer Times, Black Futures (2019), sometime around 2006 or 2007, the year that The Witch's Flight was published. I think, in a variety of ways, that book came out of a lot of the questions that I had at the end of writing The Witch's Flight. The last chapter is titled "Reflections on the Black Femme's Role in the Reproduction of Cinematic Reality: The Case of Eve's Bayou." Eve's Bayou (1997, dir. Kasi Lemmons) was an important film for me, because it provided me with an opening for thinking about how aesthetic products, commodities like film, in this case, might have the capacity to make perceptible elements of subterranean social realities that pose a challenge to dominant commonsense conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. And so Eve's Bayou is a film that has an all-Black cast and no explicitly queer characters. Yet for me it offered a way to explicate a certain capacity of film to disrupt hegemonic conceptions of social reality, including the logic through which women, Black femmes, and lesbians solidified at the time. So I named that the "Black femme function," and the last sentence of that book was about how, in spite of the narrator's attempt at closure, the Black femme functions to disrupt such closures, insisting on the existence of a radical elsewhere. For me, then, that idea, the "radical elsewhere," is what I took up in some ways in Queer Time, Black Futures, where I also started to think about the significance of digital media and digital technologies.I wanted to understand the significance of these new technologies for Black, queer, and trans formations, especially in relation to the idea Chandan shared in the opening of the panel of a "present moment of danger." One idea in that book that I think is worth following up on is the idea of "de-creating America," which I understand to be really quite different from "decentering America."I think there's also still work we can do to understand the central role of technology, including but not limited to communications technology and media industries, in the fascist and reactionary moment that we're confronting today. I was recently part of a conversation with Stefano Harney at the beginning of October, and that conversation has me thinking that there is more work to be done to better understand art, including film, in this moment and their relationship to finance capital, and where we as intellectuals, cultural producers, and artists fit into the calculations of profits and risk that drive finance capital. But I think that that's really something we need to reckon with and understand right now.GG: I want to emphasize Kara's rich interrogation of liberal visibility politics. In Unruly Visions, I make an argument for how queer aesthetics allows us to make the connections between historical phenomena and social formations that have been obscured by the legacies of colonial modernity. Against liberal visibility, I mobilize in the book what I call a queer optic, a way of seeing that brings out these connections, and renders apparent the interrelation of different historical phenomena and intertwined histories that have been seen as discrete and unrelated. And here I'm very much building on the magnificent work of Lisa Lowe in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), to argue that it's through the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora that we can apprehend the intimacies of histories of transatlantic slavery of colonial and postcolonial labor migrations and indigenous dispossession together. Ultimately, this book is about, I would say, radical relationality: the unexpected interconnections between apparently radically dissimilar formations. This is what Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (2011) termed "strange affinities," in their anthology by the same name.This is where I see my work as relevant in some ways to the situation happening today. Thinking with this idea of "strange affinities" that Rod and Grace gave us, I'm thinking of some of the signs I've seen recently at protests over these past weeks, "Kashmir stands with Palestine," "Black Trans Lives for Palestine." This is very much about solidarity across difference rather than sameness. And in that spirt I've been rereading Édouard Glissant's 1997 work Poetics of Relation. And even though I don't directly engage with Glissant in Unruly Visions, his notion of opacity is actually very much a strategy I see at work in the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora that I'm mapping out in the book. These are practices that repudiate demands of visibility, of representation, of identity along the lines of Kara's early work. Indeed, so much of the work that I look at refuses and blocks the gaze in different ways. For instance, we can look at Allen deSouza's work where he takes family photographs and overlays them with the detritus of his own body till you can barely see the image underneath. It's also apparent in the work of South Asian diasporic artist Chitra Ganesh, where she uses her parents' honeymoon photos in the early '70s in India, where the figure of the mother is barely apparent, marooned in a kind of alien landscape, which I think speaks to the absolute alienation produced by heteronormativity. And, too, we can turn to Tracey Moffat's "Night Spirits," images where she evokes spectral presences that I read as the spectral presence of Indigenous communities in this landscape that is narrated as having wiped out Indigenous presence. These are images of ongoing indigenous dispossession.If transparency, surveillance, regulation, and fixing are all strategies of colonial and racial domination, then opacity, as Glissant teaches us, is a powerful strategy of refusal: it's the "right" to not be known, to not be rendered transparent. And what really resonates for me in this current moment is the way Glissant renders this idea of opacity as the basis of relationality. Here is a quote from Glissant (1997: 190): "Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly, one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components." I really love that, and I've been really thinking about that: focusing on the texture of the weave, of what is produced in the entanglements, rather than focusing in on some kind of essential element of the components. So too, he references texture, or the haptic that extends beyond the visual.RF: Totally! Returning to One-Dimensional Queer, in that book I ask, What gets obscured and suppressed through hegemonic affirmation? What gets suppressed are all the histories of intersectional, queer, and trans organizing that provide a political alternative to one-dimensionality. What does it mean to reclaim the histories of, for example, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in New York or Dyketactics! in Philly, and so on? And what does it mean to reclaim them for now? Because it's not like the one-dimensionality is going to go away, but we need some counterforce to address that one-dimensionality. We're at this moment now where we see another kind of one-dimensionality. And that is, in terms of my reading: how do we get these minoritized formations to not say "Palestine," to not talk about the long history of the occupation, the long history of settler colonialism? In other words, not to do that work—not only to not come to voice but also not to immerse ourselves in the rich histories and literatures about the occupation and the contestation of the occupation.When I was president of the American Studies Association, Kandice Chuh and I made it our job as presidents to immerse ourselves in that history, that literature. And we said, "Okay, we're not going to write the typical statements that the presidents do. We're going to use these statements as mini-lectures about the nature of the occupation and the role of the United States after the shift from the British Empire." We were asking everyone in the