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  • Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser, and: Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life by Tavia Nyong’o
  • Camille S. Owens (bio)
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: New York University Press, 2018; 235 pp.; illustrations. $89.00 cloth, $27.00 paper, e-book available.
Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. By Tavia Nyong’o. New York: New York University Press, 2018; 265 pp.; illustrations. $89.00 cloth, $29.00 paper, e-book available.

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life by Tavia Nyong’o chart new circuits through the intersection of black studies, queer studies, and performance studies. Published as part of the Sexual Cultures series of NYU Press upon its 20th anniversary, Musser’s and Nyong’o’s works address at least the last two decades — if not a century — of critical inquiry on blackness, brownness, queerness, and humanism. Considering the structural antagonisms and representational imperatives of US (and hemispheric) regimes of race, gender, and capital, Musser and Nyong’o theorize performance practices that lead out from these epochal binds. Musser takes a route through the sensual and spatial; Nyong’o traces virtual flights across multiple temporalities. Fueled by their deep engagements in an intergenerational and interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Musser and Nyong’o mark new time and space for studying queer, black, and brown performance.

Musser’s Sensual Excess explores black and brown femme performances, discerning the pleasures and self-making possibilities that arise in and through violent structures. Working from Hortense Spillers’s paradigm of the pornotrope as the symbolic apparatus of black female abjection, Musser invites us to consider the fleshy pleasures and counter-epistemologies that such “violence produces and [yet] cannot incorporate” (9). Theorizing brown jouissance as that unincorporated, erotic, and opaque excess, Musser brings the critical insight of Audre Lorde and Édouard Glissant to bear on the Oedipal economy of psychoanalysis. Moving away from the episteme of sexuality and phallocentrism, Musser considers the sensual erotics that inhere in the breach of the familial and the ecstasy that arises, not in subjectivity, but in relation. Musser acts as a sensorial guide through black and brown femininity’s queer disruptions of domination, detecting brown jouissance across the surfaces and textures of her assembled archive.

The introduction stages a first encounter with brown jouissance in the collapsed-yet-inhabited space of “ecstatic openness and insatiability” (5) between Lyle Ashton Harris and Billie Holiday in Harris’s photograph, “Billie 21” (2002). Brown jouissance is as labile as it is alluring in this first reading, and the following chapters both cohere and disperse its meaning further. Chapter 1 locates brown jouissance in the labial and permeable selfhoods of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1979) and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014). Identifying the scale and irrepressible funk of A Subtlety’s infamous sugar vulva as a site of epistemic intervention, Musser then advances her discussion of labial possibilities in chapter 2, where she reads the rhinestoned opacity and excess surface of Mickalene Thomas’s Origin of the Universe 1 (2012) as a site of radical narcissism and poetic relationality.

Chapter 3 moves from visual constructions of the flesh to the fleshy, filmed performances of Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson’s Untitled Fucking (2013) and Cheryl Dunye’s Mommy Is Coming (2012). Reading scenes of topping, bottoming, and deep listening between Latinx, black, white, masculine, and feminine performers, Musser shows how pleasure, care, and agency “can be grasped in all sorts of positions” (85). In chapter 4, Musser discerns another register of care in the practices of “mothering” (114) and “kinship” (118) forged by Carrie Mae Weems [End Page 199] across centuries, diaspora, and photographic medium in her 1995–1996 installation, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. Chapter 5 shifts from considering Weems’s painstaking photographic process to the tear-inducing processes of video artmaking by Nao Bustamante and Patty Chang. Taking up José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “brown feeling” (2006:676), Musser reads filmed performances of “automatic” (120) tears in Bustamante’s...

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