After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life by Joshua Chambers-Letson (review)

Joshua Chambers-Letson’s After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life rests on a somewhat painful contradiction. Although the book ostensibly delves into the modes of life and aesthetics that sustain the queers of color in the subtitle, there is a deep sense of loss that permeates the text. The preface is an apostrophe addressed to José Esteban Muñoz, Chambers-Letson’s mentor and close friend, who passed away in 2013. Chambers-Letson recalls the immediate shock and aftermath of Muñoz’s passing, in particular arriving to the apartment that had been the site of so many gatherings and parties and which would now soon be vacated. These recollections are accompanied by the devastating understanding that the future which Muñoz had written so hopefully about was now marked by an absence that left us with the uncertainty of how exactly to imagine a future the late theorist had been so essential in helping us imagine. The “after” of the title is the after that Chambers-Letson and countless others would now be wondering about in the wake of this absence. Indeed, what could come after such an earth-shattering loss? As the subtitle suggests, however, the goal of this book is to somehow try and find an after — not just any after, but one invested with finding the aesthetic spaces where queer of color life may still thrive, in spite of the knowledge of just how precarious this promise of life is for queers of color.

After the Party is filled with figures, some unabashedly queer, some who move through the world queerly, whose works provide us with a blueprint of how to continue living in the time of grief. Nina Simone, Danh Vō, Félix González-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi are the protagonists, with other figures appearing throughout the book. Chambers-Letson approaches them with a sense of loving familiarity that deftly moves across each of their oeuvres. He makes clear in the introduction that he chose these artists in part because they were central to helping him make sense of the world anew in the aftermath of loss, something that is reflected here as an offering that he passes on to the reader.

After the Party draws from performance studies not only in its critical genealogies and objects of study, but also in its awareness of the audience, in this case the reader. Chambers-Letson refers to the reader in the second person throughout the book, which gives the writing a sense of informal intimacy that reminds us of the body (I am holding this book) and as an invitation to engage (I am listening, viewing, witnessing with).

Each of the chapters is organized around a central concern drawn from the intersection of performance studies and Marxism. The first chapter, on Nina Simone, investigates how the great artist understood her relationship to performance in terms of labor. Chambers-Letson structures the chapter in the form of a mixtape that deploys the sonic and visual archive of Simone’s performance of freedom, placing this oeuvre in larger Black feminist genealogies of struggles for freedom, a concept that the author rigorously interrogates while keeping hope that something like it is still possible. The following chapter, primarily focused on the work of the Vietnamese-born Dutch artist Danh Vō, takes up the concept of reproduction. Reproduction appears here both as the female labor of procreation and as a central notion across histories of performance studies. Chambers-Letson provides an elegiac reading of how the work of mothers is intimately tied not only to the function of capital accumulation but also as an element embedded in our encounter and transmission of the aesthetic. As Chambers-Letson writes, “Marx appropriated metaphors of biological reproduction to illustrate the process of capital’s reproduction” (92). The chapter takes this as a potential site...