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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1285-1305



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Reflections, Riffs and Remembrances:
The Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000)

Bryant Keith Alexander


Black performance studies would mean study of ways in which black people, through communicative action, create and continue to create themselves within the American experience. Such an approach would contain several interrelated notions, among them that 'performance' involves an individual or group of people interpreting an existing tradition--reinventing themselves--in front of an audience, or public.

--Manthia Diawara 1

The intricate manner in which Manthia Diawara reconstructs the project of Black Studies as Black Performance Studies offers a descriptive frame in which to outline the intention, the occasion and the effect of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, April 7-9, 2000. Surely it was an occasion in which Black queer folk engaged in a process of interpreting an existing tradition (Queer Studies)--and reinvented themselves (Black Queer Studies) in front of a specified audience. "The impetus for this conference [was to address the] theoretical gap in the creation of academic discourse on lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people [in which] current formulations of queer theory either ignore the categories of race and class or theorize their effects in 'discursive' rather than material terms." 2

Several critical questions undergirded and guided inquiry and engagement of conference issues: "What are the implications of queer theory for the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people of color? Does 'queer,' as a term, actually fulfill its promise of inclusivity as it is currently deployed in queer theory? How do those of us who teach queer theory effectively integrate the categories of race, class and materiality with sexuality? How do we who are activists reconcile queer theory with political praxis? What is the impact of queer theory on the production, reception and analysis of black gay literature and cultural performance?"3

In Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner begins to articulate an interpretation of queer theory as a "resistance to regimes of the normal" (xxvi). Thus, the method of this paper, like the conference itself, is described as queer--which has less to do with the subject matter or the body writing the essay, like the bodies in attendance at the conference--as much as the occasion, form and effect. The essay chronicles the conference as a resistant performance and individual participants at the conference as cultural workers. Each participant spoke from their own "dense particularity"--working against notions of queer that do not acknowledge the implications of race and [End Page 1285] ethnicity as intervening variables (Mohanty 13). This is a queer essay--in that it is a resistant performance against form, structure and the ideologies that undergird notions of "normalcy" of/in academic discourse moving towards the individualized practice of self-expression. The essay uses reflections, riffs and remembrances in order to reconstruct the salient occurrences at The Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (BQSMC).

Marking Intentions

The conference was framed in four presentations: a welcome and introductory comments by conference planners E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, an introduction of the Special Issue of Callaloo by Charles H. Rowell, and the keynote address by Phillip Brian Harper. The presentations were like coming home speeches, commemoration speeches that marked the occasion of the gathering and tracked the multiple paths of our journey: how we arrived and why. They were stories of travel and crossing borders. Each presentation constructed the conference as a "border crossing," suggesting positionality: bodies poised at the intersection of geographical boundaries, capable of spanning new territories and focused on scanning the intellectual and cultural terrain of neighboring lands. The metaphor suggests an exploration and an envisioning of new places and new ways of (re)seeing, (re)doing and being.

Border crossings are imbued with the spirit of adventure and calculated with a purpose: to seek, to find, to engage, to know. They are also fraught with danger, encountering the unknown, challenge, rejection, evaluation and critique. Crossing borders ultimately...

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