Of Unexplained Presences, Flying Ife Heads, Vampires, Sweat, Zombies, and Legbas: A Meditation on Black Queer Aesthetics

This review, a meditation, considers how two multigenre arts events, DASH (Austin, Texas; October 2009) and the Ghetto Biennale (Port-au-Prince, Haiti; December 2009), when considered side by side, present the material and theoretical terms for articulating black queer aesthetics. These black queer aesthetics, rather than a static set of signifiers, emerge as practices and imaginings that engage and interweave multiple notions of time, material realities, and the specificities of space (bodies, locations, geographies), including afro-futurism, afro-spiritual sensibilities and practices, waste ("refusé"), and sexuality.