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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1278-1284



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Just as Quare as They Want to Be:
A Review of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference

Vincent Woodard


The latter part of the 20th century has seen the emergence of radical black lesbian feminists and gay men who have begun to address the forces within black culture and the culture at large that have rendered their experiences and sensibilities silent. Theorizing from margin to center, individuals such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam, among others, have undertaken the hard work of creating language and theoretical paradigms, building literal communities, and excavating black history as a means of validating their humanity and longstanding contributions to black cultural formation. In light of this recent artistic and intellectual renaissance, the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference, held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from April 7-9, 2000, marked a moment of profound historical reflection and cultural recalibration. Building upon a legacy of work generated by black transgendered, lesbian, gay and bisexual writers and intellectuals, those black queers who assembled at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined to rethink and recalibrate the essential meanings of blackness and queerness from their own particular subject positions. Recalling DuBois's notion of the problematic black subject at the turn of the 20th century, this conference foregrounded black same-sexual identity politics, homosexual desire and transgressive, non-heterosexist bodies as essential axiomatic problems to be considered by a Black and Queer Studies committed to addressing the needs of the new millennium.

The skillful and generous organizers of the conference, Professors E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, described the conference as one intent upon examining how black queer theorists, in particular, can critically intervene in the formation of Queer Studies as a disciplinary project. To clarify the particular nature of this intervention, the organizers outlined a set of postulatory questions that provided the infrastructure and focus of the conference's five panel discussions and keynote address: 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 deployed in queer theory? How do those of us who teach queer theory effectively integrate the categories of race, class and materiality? How do we who are activists reconcile queer theory with political praxis? What is the impact of queer theory on the reception and analysis of black gay literature and cultural performance? [End Page 1278]

Professor Phillip Brian Harper's Keynote Address synthesized these questions into an inquiring teleology of black queer migration, interior journeying and eternal questing after the rest and comfort of a stabilized mother/homeland. Titling his address, "The Evidence of Felt Intuition," Harper's remarks immediately called to mind Audre Lorde's theorizing upon the erotic. For profound intellectual pleasure intermingled with the actual horror of Harper's returning, in a sense, to the originary scene of a crime. Harper's journey begins on an Amtrak train and with an innocent white man approaching him and accusing him of originating from Sri Lanka. After convincing the man of his black Americanness, the white man quickly stutters and meanders away. However, this primal scene, to borrow a phrase from conference presenter Sharon Holland, veils deeper narratives of homosexual desire, nationality and citizenry according to Harper. The white man's erotic attraction (translated into his foreignness and significantly non-blackness), his lingering gaze, his posture and particular points of eye contact register in the interior, in the experiential domain Harper chooses to name "felt intuition." Throughout his talk Harper returned to a central question: by what mechanism does one perceive and then proceed to decipher the multiple layers of homosexual desire, racialization and nation formation constantly enacted upon and generated from within the black faggot body? Perhaps even more crucial than the recovery of empirical evidence of a black queer past, Harper seemed to advocate that an...

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