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Acknowledgments I am frankly amazed and a little embarrassed by the sheer amount of patience , generosity, and good will that have been shown to me and to Once You Go Black as we have developed over the last several years. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded me a research grant for the 2002–2003 academic year that enabled me to complete a large amount of work while also forming what I hope will be lifelong relationships with friends and colleagues in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. Guenter Lenz of the Humboldt University of Berlin sponsored my application to the Humboldt Foundation and proved to be a wonderful host and mentor. Thomas Ebel ensured the survival of all the best parts of me, even during the most unforgiving Berlin winter and the fantastic spring and summer that followed. At home, my students and colleagues at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York daily surprise me with their intelligence, flexibility, skill, commitment , courage, and again that unsettling generosity. Our last executive officer , Joan Richardson, greatly facilitated my leave, while our current leader, Steve Kruger, has proven to be not only a fine administrator but also a selflessly giving intellectual. Three individuals, Fabio Parasecoli, Arnaldo CruzMalav é, and Wayne Koestenbaum, read complete drafts of this book. I thank them for their time and care, and I apologize for those rough patches in this work that I am certain would have been smoothed over if I had indeed taken all their advice to heart and mind. Earlier versions of chapters four and five appeared in the on-line journal Cultural Matters, issue I (fall 2001), and in Elahe Haschemi Yekani and Beatrice Michaelis’s collection Quer Durch die Geisteswissenschaften: Perspektiven der Queer Theory (Quer Verlag, 2005). I read excerpts from Once You Go Black at George Mason University, the University of Washington, the University of Tennessee, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Free vii University of Berlin, Clark University, the Miami University of Ohio, the University of Michigan, and New York University. I would like to thank all of the individuals responsible for inviting me. In particular, I have to mention Heather Love, Henry Abelove, Donald Pease and Robyn Weigman, Stephanie Dunning, Winston Napier, Scott Trafton, Paul Smith, Samuel Delany, Phillip Brian Harper, and Shelly Eversley for the amazing conversations about my work that they helped to initiate. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii ...

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