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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1274-1277



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Theory In Motion:
A Review of the Black Queer Studies In The Millennium Conference

Jennifer DeVere Brody


Wahneema Lubiano's closing remarks provide me an opening for my review of the Black Queer Studies conference, which took place during the weekend of April 7-9, 2000, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In her stunning, breathlessly delivered comments, Prof. Lubiano argued for the value of "praxis makes perfect"--her refined, redefinition of the common sense phrase "practice makes perfect." By making fungible the privileged term--replacing mere practice with the Marxist-inflected "praxis," she queered the quotation of quotidian logic and emphasized the way in which the work of the conference and its workers "transformed the existing world making something different, additional." Moreover, the thought-action (the hyphen swings both ways here) of the conference was essayed before the theorists "knew it would work," to paraphrase Lubiano. In short, the conference produced critical interventions within both black and queer studies.

Expertly organized by Professors Mae Henderson and E. Patrick Johnson, the conference explored topics such as: "Disciplinary Tensions," Policing Black Bodies," "Representing the 'Race,'" "How to Teach the Unspeakable," and "Black Queer Fiction: Who's Reading Us?" The rationale for the "collaboration that at times felt like collusion," to quote Prof. Henderson, was explained in the conference literature as follows:

The impetus for this conference . . . concerns the current status of Queer Studies in the academy [which] either ignore[s] the categories of race and class or theorize[s] their effects in "discursive" rather than material terms. Thus, we hope to take advantage of this occasion to explore the implications of Queer Studies on the pedagogy, research, and theorizing of African American scholars who identify as queer and/or who do teaching, research, and cultural work in this field. This conference will focus on how black queer theorists, in particular, can critically intervene in the formation of Queer Studies as a disciplinary project.

Indeed, almost every panel took up the challenges outlined by the organizers. The collective performances moved its audience of presenters--in keeping with its similar deconstruction of disciplinary boundaries and disciplined sexualities, the conference deconstructed the usual boundary between subject and object as participants were [End Page 1274] both presenters and audience members. This constant shifting of critical/cultural lens allowed everyone to have a stake in the practice/praxis at hand. In particular Alycee Lane and Maurice Wallace addressed the difficulties of serving student/consumer interests and teaching queer texts in the classroom--asking the important question: how to queer a classroom, by the teacher or by the text?

Intervening in the separate camps, if you will, epitomized by problematic analogies such as "Camp is to gay, as Soul is to Black," 1 the conference addressed, implicitly and explicitly, the common sense lacuna (in part derived from civil rights discourse that apportions the diverse interests of diversity) that allows us to read race and sexuality as competing discourses. The conference explored both the absence and the presence of queers of color vis-à-vis queer studies. As one of the participant/observers in/of the event (I chaired a session on pedagogy)--it is my estimation that the conference marked a significant moment in the mobilization of new work (not to mention scholars) in the inter/anti discipline of black queer studies. Setting the stage for subsequent presentations (which occurred, appropriately, in several auditoriums on the UNC campus) was the keynote address by Phillip Brian Harper, whose own trip to the dais was remarkable for its unexpected complication--because of cancelled flights he rushed without sustenance via a variety of vehicles (planes, trains, and taxicabs) to deliver his speech-act about the (mis)perception and intuition which also chronicled his dozen years working through queer studies. Harper's wonderful address highlighted the peripatetic form and substance of "queer journeys." At one moment in the discourse, he lamented the weariness of weathering whiteness and having to bare and again bear the burdens of difference(s). He did this...

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