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Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies: Introduction

2000; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2000.0003

1080-6512

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Dwight A. McBride,

Race, History, and American Society

Given that much recent work in the field of queer studies has employed and deployed ideas of mapping local and global geographies, how might we conceive of the place of black queer studies? Answering this query is one of the goals of this special issue of Callaloo: A Journal of African and African-American Arts and Letters. If "queer studies" as a category has already raised an entire set of questions and issues for scholars, artists, culture producers and readers to address about identity, sexuality, desire, and gender, "black queer studies" has only upped the ante given the fraught relations among and between these often overlapping kinds of black and queer communities. Drawing its influences from sources such as identity politics, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, race theory, gay and lesbian studies, masculinity studies and queer studies, "black queer studies" pushes for a greater degree of specificity in both the questions being formulated and on the conclusions being reached at the margins of American society. "Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies" represents an effort on the part of Callaloo and on the part of the editors of this special issue of the journal to pull together some of the most recent voices in order to form a conversation about black queer studies.