Read an Excerpt
No Tea, No Shade
New Writings in Black Queer Studies
By E. Patrick Johnson Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7371-1
CHAPTER 1
Black/Queer Rhizomatics
Train Up a Child in the Way Ze Should Grow ...
JAFARI S. ALLEN
For All of Them
WELL CHILD, I WILL TELL YOU: Audre Lorde never promised you a rose garden. Or a crystal stair swept clean of tacks, with no boards torn up, or places where there ain't been no carpet on the floor/bare. Rather, she and others have bequeathed a this or that which promises only continued devastation and certain destruction, on one hand, or possibilities — speech, visibility (if not yet recognition), articulation, home-making, joy, love, for example — on the other, which must be worked for, and for which there are no guarantees. As enticement toward protracted struggle, Lorde offers the following:
... If we win
there is no telling.
we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meeting.
Far from a rose garden, this meditation, toward a critical pedagogical agenda, assays a renarrativization of and for Black studies — finding rhizomes rather than "roots." And, indeed, as always, routes — in and out of families, discourses, and movements. Finding nourishment, as water lilies do, in deep dark muck. Persistent like bamboo and other creeping grasses. Rare and delicate like orchids. Here I want to propose a Black/queer rhizomatic agencement — including literatures, politics, and methodologies — as well as demonstrate a Black/queer rhizomatic way of seeing and saying. In nature, rhizomes arise from underground or underwater connections/roots/routes that are neither limited to one place nor destined to go in only one direction. The rhizomatic thus represents a queer temporality and sociality that is processual — not teleological or "narrativized in advance." A rhizomatic conceptualization of relations, space, and time. This temporality is one of time collapsed or at least reconfigured — not "straight time," in which, for example, what is putatively most important happens in the daytime, or in which one "grows out of" same-sex "play" or finally "settles down" into heteronormative or homonormative sociality. In this time, one can project imaginations into the future and cut into the past — all in the pursuit of an elaborated litany for thriving. In this space, desires and socialities claim family and children not merely from biological or legal means but also by a process of nurture and nourishment. In some respects, Audre Lorde has already given us this utopic vision of work, love, and struggle:
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours
Here I take inspiration not only from Hughes and Lorde but also from French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the rhizome — including and beyond tradition and history: creative, promiscuous, underground or underwater, multiple, and sometimes contradictory — to propose Black/queer rhizomatics. The rhizome (from the Greek for "mass of roots") is the mode of propagation and sustenance for plants as diverse as the lotus, bamboo, bunch grasses, ginger, irises, and orchids. Digging up a clump of bamboo from its so-called roots will not mean that the bamboo will not grow at that site. Deracinated never. The lotus flower seems to appear out of nowhere "without roots" but gains nutrients and information buried deeply in its dark, watery grove. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari encourage us to "form rhizomes and not roots, never plant! Don't sow, forage! Be neither a One nor a Many, but multiplicities! Form a line, never a point! ... and let your loves be like the wasp and the orchid. As they sing of old man river:
He don't plant taters
Don't plant cotton
Them that plants them is soon
forgotten
But old man river he just keeps rollin'
along."
If that ain't "quare," I don't know what is! With varying intensities, Black diaspora scholars have already followed the seductive pull of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic rhizomatic model of analysis — notably, including Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant. They were each, of course, searching for new ways to engage age-old experiences of forced, coerced, and free movement; connection; and difficult, materially consequential origin stories (if not "origins") in the context of modernity. Glissant held that "rhizomatic thought is the principle behind ... poetics of relations, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other." As J. Lorand Matory reminds us, Gilroy too flirted with the notion of the rhizome/rhizomatic in Black Atlantic, but does not pursue this in his search for ways to read intermixture, exchange, hybridity, and doubleness through chronotypes — famously settling on the figure of the ship. While I am not aware of the particular language of rhizomes previously being taken up in Black/queer or Black feminist work, the spirit of this is clearly at work in the ways scholars and artists have engaged the question of "roots" and routes — not necessarily apropos of moving place but of reckoning ancestry (in terms of claiming and recalling early same-gender-loving artists and writers) and shifting, combining, and rethinking aesthetic, intellectual, and political traditions. You may consider this both on everyday and more rarified levels. Think, for example, about Cathy Cohen's skillful and timely reversal of strategic early twentieth-century DuBoisian and Lockean politics of representation and respectability, to focus precisely on "punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens" toward finally achieving the ends for which a preceding generation of Black scholars had also fought. The Black/queer rhizome is generative, as it inspires connection beyond a staid, linear genealogy; it rejects old teleologies of heteronormative natural "progress" from a single root or (family) tree. Feel here the ineluctable association and relatedness with "intersectionality." The ways in which African (descended) groups (dis)identify as Black (or "black"), Afro-hyphenated, Kréyol, Creole, mixed, or other ways of naming or signifying (Black) hybridity do not occur in a vacuum. These choices are conditioned by particularities of place, as well as other relations that include and simultaneously surpass the local. This of course includes Black LGBTQ/SGL hybridity which is variously and oftentimes controversially named today vis-à-vis this clumsy acronym to which we necessarily continue to add letters.
I have already suggested that in what many of us now call Black queer studies, as "outside children" of Black studies and queer studies, we claim new ways to queerly trace our emergences beyond patronymic reconstruction, to do a new dance — precipitating a shift, structuring a conjuncture. In tracing intellectual, artistic, and activist rhizomatic formations, we are compelled to envision and produce work that is deeply humane and capacious. Our analyses reflect not only "real life" on the ground but also speculate on liberatory models from the past, and project our imaginations forward, to possible futures. This call is not to imagine one single rhizome — of, let's say, bamboo — creeping all over the world, but rather a historically derived sociocultural system with political-economic structures in its "DNA." For our purposes in this meditation, the Black/queer rhizomatic agencement is most profitably thought of as a habit of mind — a way of seeing and saying as much as a mode of thinking or doing. The rhizomatic is beyond tradition and memory: creative, promiscuous, multiple, and often contradictory. Like this essay. The generative value of difference, performativity, and play in the rhizomatic, and its grounding in a commitment to address material circumstances and the metaphysical at once, parallel Black/queer poetic traditions. Like Black/queer, the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari offer, "doesn't begin and doesn't end, but is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo." Today, this is where Black/queer studies finds itself — in medias res. That is, entering into conversations already begun — not with the intention to falsify, but rather to more fundamentally reorder, critically retell stories long told and overlooked, and compose new stories out of our word-rich grammars.
Thus, the analysis offered here emerges from close readings of important nodes of the present moment and the recent past, to theorize a "new and more possible meeting" of our artists, activists, scholars, policymakers, and intellectuals. This formulation seeks to include and move beyond disagreements around language of "same-gender loving," "LGBT," "queer," and "DL" in the United States, and various local names and concepts used to (self)identify gender nonnormative, "sexual minority," or otherwise nonheteronormative individuals of Africa(n descent), in various parts of the world. Looking beyond "survival" that was never meant for us, toward societal transformation and thriving, will require shifting the narratives we have rehearsed, toward a future in which we are indeed "fluent in each other's histories" and conversant in each other's imaginations. Scholars have already assayed jeremiads, corrections, and agendas that were warranted by the moments in which they were offered, and some of which are essential to return to consider at this important social-cultural conjuncture. While elements of each find expression here, this is not (only) a critique or a genealogy or a lament, but rather a meditation taking a hybrid form in an attempt to "say some things I think ought to be said" about Black (and) queer intellectual traditions and pedagogies. After all, this is an important moment to critically reassess (and celebrate) the project we have come to know as Black queer studies. Today, the economic outlook is foggy; the political landscape is stony, contradictory, and riddled with fissures. There are reminders every day — from the banal to the spectacular — of the denial of Black beauty, Black dignity, and Black life. Further, the academic and intellectual foundations on which Black studies was built seem to shift beneath our feet (still). This is a conjunctural moment, full of complex challenges and opportunities — a few which are new (or newly configured), and others that remind us, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Given increased visibility, articulation, and backlash, in the wake of the Combahee River Collective Statement, the Black Nations/Queer Nations conference, books such as the Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference and resulting Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, and the raft of monographs produced in the last twenty or so years, for example: Whither this project that Essex Hemphill described as the "creation of evidence of being ... powerful enough to transform the very nature of our existence"? Of course, to be precise, the project that Hemphill helped create and spoke of here in his introduction to the first edition of Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, was not an academic one but part and parcel of a larger Black lesbian and gay movement, led by artists and intellectuals. What are the conditions of possibility for beautiful and transformative Black/queer work today? Where should we look for inspiration? To whom are we accountable? How should those of us located in academe respond and push the project forward?
Black/Queer Teaching in the Black Studies Classroom
I am not naïve enough to believe that scholarly work creates everyday resistance and survival by the most multiply vulnerable among us. But it can give light to it — helping expand recognition of those sites as legitimate political expression and providing the basis for institutional support. Moreover, despite attacks on Black studies and other reminders that the U.S. academy is an engine of racialized capitalism, just as much or more than it is a society of friends of each other's mind, teaching is clearly and incontrovertibly a site in which we can work to evidence being and to transform ourselves and our students. In any event, it is my work to do where I am. After all, as poet Marvin K. White quoted to me from his own scriptures and prophesying Black/queer genius: among our highest calling is to "train up a child in the way he should vogue, and when he is old he will turn it."
So, what if: What if the now more than forty-year track record of Black feminist artistry, scholarship, and activism were taken seriously as the formative center of late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Black studies? What if concepts of "normativity" and "respectability" were critically taken to task and taken back by Black studies, pushed forward and transformed? What if experimentation, affect and futurity — some of the scholarly, artistic, and activist modes and methods of early Black knowledge and cultural producers, now repackaged as new and sexy and white, were taken seriously — that is, funded, reenergized, published, hired, and promoted in Black studies?
Currently, many scholars seem to agree with the Combahee River Collective's Black feminist lesbian statement that gender, race, class, and, increasingly, sexual identities are mutually constituting and interpenetrating. Still, a commitment to producing and legitimizing work that actually takes up intersectional or interstitial analyses is still ahead of us in the traditional disciplines of the academy. While it is sadly true that the unidisciplines proceed in many cases as if Black studies had never made the contributions it has, and as if we are not here today, what if Black studies wholeheartedly embraced a rhizomatic Black/queer feminist habit of mind? What if all Black studies courses on the U.S. South or on labor or religion used E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea as a main text, or those who study African religious philosophy required students to grapple with Oshun's performativity and embodiment in the work of Omi Osun Joni Jones or Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley? What if we learned and debated and taught distinctions between DL, discreet, MSM, cisgender, transgender, femme butch bottom and top — how this self-naming and negotiation of "identity" and behavior is highly contingent and interarticulated with race, color, and nationality, for example — in Intro courses? Not only through the scholarly theorization of Matt Richardson and C. Riley Snorton, for example, but also Sharon Bridgforth's juke-joint poetic theorization of "mens, womens, some that is both, some who are neither," which likewise demonstrates a more capacious understanding and appreciation of gender expression in Black communities than current notions of sexuality, (trans)gender, or queerness can hold. How might we transform our students' understanding of "family" by placing Mignon Moore's Invisible Families on the first-year African American studies seminar syllabus, or by continuing to explode business-as-usual U.S. centrism of who gets to be Black and where, through emerging Black/queer scholarship in and on Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, New Orleans, Canada, Germany, Cuba and the French Department of the Caribbean, for example?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Tea, No Shade by E. Patrick Johnson. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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