Q&A with Monique Moultrie

Monique Moultrie is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University and author of Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality, also published by Duke University Press. In her new book Hidden Histories, she collects oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders in the United States to show how their authenticity, social justice awareness, spirituality, and collaborative leadership make them models of womanist ethical leadership. By examining their life histories, Moultrie frames queer storytelling as an ethical act of resistance to the racism, sexism, and heterosexism these women experience. 

How does Hidden Histories build on or diverge from your earlier book Passionate and Pious?

My prior work centered on Black women as they make choices about their sexuality within larger celibacy movements. While Passionate and Pious had a chapter about Black lesbian Christian women asserting their sexuality in these prescribed sexual spaces, at minimum I was tracing a story of Black Christian women leaders’ messages about sexuality. Yet, ultimately the text centers on what their followers decided to do as described to me by women participating in these movements. In Hidden Histories, my focus is slightly different as I consider Black female religious and sexual actors exerting their agency in religious spheres. Both works are about Black women in leadership and both take seriously the sexual lives of Black women. Hidden Histories diverges in its emphasis on the lived realities of leadership as I provide the first collection of oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders. I hope that Hidden Histories offers through these Black women’s stories a model of leadership that is applicable to everyone.

In your introduction, you mention how being a heterosexual ally who is not a religious leader placed you in an “outsider/within” scenario during these interviews. Within the interview setting, how did you navigate the complex, intersectional issues at hand as an “outsider”?

During the interviews I recognized that my role was to share their story and to get it right. While I was not a religious leader, I understood their passion and calling to leadership. As the spouse of a religious leader, I also could empathize with what the personal costs were for them. I made every effort to not be “in the story” but to reflect the story in my theorizing. My gleanings from their life histories needed to be professional, but I needed to share enough of myself to be vulnerable to the process. Yet, I did not pry into their private lives unless they wanted me to document something about their partners. While my first book was all about personal stories and sexual intimacies, I did not inquire about these things in the oral histories. There were many experiences we could share like racism, classism, sexism, etc., but I knew as a heterosexual I carried privileges that they did not experience. My interviews had to demonstrate a critical awareness while simultaneously trying to get their stories connected to my interest in social activism. Balancing these stories was a delicate dance.

What was the most surprising perspective or unexpected insight you heard while conducting these interviews?

Honestly, I was surprised by the number of Black women in leadership in non-majority Black spaces. When I started the project, I expected Black female religious leaders to be in Black Christian churches since statistically Black women are the most numerous participants in Black Christianity. Finding Black women leaders in other religions and women who were leading in predominately white spaces was surprising as it reiterated the impacts of sexism on Black women’s thriving. For example, each of the women who were leaders in the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, a predominately Black gay- and lesbian-affirming denomination, left the denomination. (This was not just because of their experiences with sexism; but, like others admitted, the hypocrisy in communities created for freedom from oppression was disheartening.)

Denomination-swapping was also surprising to me as a lifelong Baptist who only briefly dabbled as a member of an African Methodist Episcopal church. The fluidity in the interviewees’ denominational loyalties was unexpected but also demonstrated the obstacles in place for Black women in traditional Black church spaces and the wider economic resources available in predominately white denominations.

The insight I gained was that there are no perfect spaces for Black women leaders. Even the places that should be panaceas had problems, which made their activism, resistance, and overall perseverance even more inspiring.

How do you see the intersectionality experienced by these Black lesbian religious leaders contributing to their pursuit of social justice activism in a way distinct from other groups?

The entire book is my attempt to answer this question. Simply put: being a Black lesbian leader made a difference because of their ability to lead collaboratively, inter-generationally, and from the moral wisdom of Black women. Their intersectional lives make them aware of those on the margins, and because their gender has often limited their access to traditional forms of leadership and the resources accompanying this leadership, they tend to work within communities and with attention to social justice concerns that impact entire communities.

What are your hopes for future scholarship in this field?

I completed a study on cisgender and largely Christian Black lesbian religious leaders. This was a righteous but incomplete task. I have received funding to complete additional interviews of Black transgender religious leaders and non-Christian leaders, but due to the pandemic and my overall lack of access to these communities, my expansion of scholarship has been limited. It is my hope that my study and subsequent interviews pave a path towards exploring Black trans leadership and Black non-Christian female leaders. I also hope that the fields of African American Religion and Gender and Sexuality Studies continue to look to its margins, bringing these voices to the center.

Read the introduction to Hidden Histories for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23MLTRI.

New Books in February

Stay warm and comfy this February by curling up with a good book. Take a look at our many new titles coming out this month!

In Death’s Futurity, Sampada Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of three Black Panther Party members to examine the importance of representations of death to Black liberation.

Lucia Hulsether explores twentieth and twenty-first century movements from fair trade initiatives and microfinance programs to venture fund pledges to invest in racial equity, showing how these movements fail to achieve their goals in Capitalist Humanitarianism.

In Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film to show how women, femmes, and nonbinary people disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.”

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. 

In Unkowing and the Everyday, Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran and the idea of unknowing—the idea that it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine—shapes contemporary life.

Catherine E. Walsh examines social struggles for survival in societies deeply marked by the systemic violence of coloniality to identify practices that may cultivate the possibility of living otherwise in Rising Up, Living On.

The contributors to Eating beside Ourselves, edited by Heather Paxson, examine eating as a site of transfer and transformation that create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations.

Drawing on memoir, creative writing, theoretical analysis, and ethnography in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit in Circuits of the Sacred.

The contributors to Sovereignty Unhinged, edited by Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco, theorize sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state, considering it from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures.

Spirit in the Land, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, accompanies the art exhibition of the same name at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition, which runs February 16 to July 9, examines today’s urgent ecological concerns from a cultural perspective, demonstrating how intricately our identities and natural environments are intertwined.

When Forests Run Amok by Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety of human and nonhuman beings that compose the region of Bajo Atrato: the traditional land of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.

In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of anarchist letterpress printers and presses, whose printed materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to 1940s.

Examining the 2002 pogrom in which Hindu mobs attached Muslims in the west Indian state of Gujuarat, Moyukh Chatterjee examines how political violence against minorities catalyzes radical changes in law, public culture, and power in Composing Violence.

In The Briny South Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to analyze the formation of racialized identities in the imperial world. 

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines, showing how heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire.

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New Books in January

New year, new books! Check out the great new titles we have coming out in January:

In Wake Up, This Is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of its residents, showing how its urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, widescale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Chérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently in To Be Nsala’s Daughter.

In Code, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

Lee Edelman offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape in Bad Education.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism in Palestine/Israel in Invited to Witness, showing how such tourism functions both as political strategy and emergent industry.

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh.

Drawing on fieldwork in a Chinese toxicology lab that studies the influence of toxins on male reproductive and developmental health, Janelle Lamoreaux investigates how epigenetic research conceptualizes and configures environments in Infertile Environments.

In On Learning to Heal, Ed Cohen draws on his experience living with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him—to explore how modern Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” impacts all whose lives are touched by illness.

Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas in Hard Luck and Heavy Rain, showing how their hard-luck stories render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism.

Josen Masangkay Diaz interrogates the distinct forms of Filipino American subjectivity that materialized from the relationship between the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and Cold War US anticommunism in Postcolonial Configurations.

In The Spectacular Generic, Cori Hayden explores how consumer access to generic drugs has transformed public health care and the politics of pharmaceuticals in the global South.

Petrus Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism in The Specter of Materialism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality.

In Uncomfortable Television, Hunter Hargraves examines how postmillennial television made its audiences find pleasure through discomfort, showing that televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives.

Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of the underground in nineteenth-century US literature in Going Underground, showing how these formations of the underground can inspire new forms of political resistance.

Travelling from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States, the authors of Vanishing Sands, Orrin H. Pilkey, Norma J. Longo, William J. Neal, Nelson G. Rangel-Buitrago, Keith C. Pilkey, and Hannah L. Hayes, track the devastating environmental, social, and economic impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years.

Vincanne Adams takes the complex chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—to explore the formation of contested knowledge in Glyphosate and the Swirl.

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Gift Books On Sale

Our Cyber Monday sale continues today and tomorrow. Are you looking for some books that would make great gifts? Here are some suggestions. Use coupon CYBER22 to save 50% on these and all in-stock and pre-order titles.

Looking for gifts for sports fans? We have two new books about basketball. Capturing the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of the countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball, in Lost in the Game Thomas Beller charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it. And in Big Game, Small World, Alexander Wolff travels the globe in search of what basketball can tell us about the world, and what the world can tell us about the game.

How about a memoir? Give your gay uncle Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood by John D’Emilio, in which the historian takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood and Columbia University to New York’s hidden gay male subculture and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. Perhaps you also have a tía or two; they might enjoy Magical Habits by Monica Huerta, in which she draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives. Have a friend who is a graphic novel fan? Give them The Inheritance, a graphic memoir by theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth A. Povinelli, which explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Another recent memoir is Atlantis, an Autoanthropology, a literary memoir and autoethnography by poet Nathaniel Tarn which captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. 

For poetry fans, we have many excellent gift ideas. Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being. In or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life through a book-length poem. When the Smoke Cleared contains poetry written by incarcerated poets in Attica Prison and journal entries and poetry by Celes Tisdale, who led poetry workshops following the uprising there in 1971. In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. And in Good night the pleasure was ours musician and poet David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. Get the whole set!

Got a musician or music fan in your life? Here are some recent gift-worthy music titles. Jazz fans will enjoy Ain’t But a Few of Us, a collection of essays by and interviews with Black Jazz writers, edited by Willard Jenkins. Or give Cisco Bradley’s Universal Tonality, a highly-praised biography of jazz bassist William Parker. Perhaps their taste runs to New Wave music instead? Check out No Machos or Pop Stars by Gavin Butt, which tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, and A Kiss across the Ocean by Richard T. Rodríguez, which  examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Rap and hip hop fans will appreciate Breaks in the Air, in which John Klaess tells the story of rap’s emergence on New York City’s airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop’s performance culture to radio.

For the activists in your life, we suggest Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk, which demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements. And for those interested in advocating for veterans, we suggest Our Veterans by Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven,

And finally, since we’re Duke University Press, after all, we bet you have some theory fans on your gift list. Make sure they have a copy of Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People, which Judith Butler calls “magisterial” and “brilliant.”

Books ordered this week will arrive in time for Hanukkah and Christmas if shipped to a US address. We cannot guarantee holiday arrival for international shipments. See all the fine print here. Pre-order titles will not arrive in time for the holidays.

We’re pleased that our distributors Combined Academic Publishers and University of Toronto Press are also participating in the sale. Customers outside North and South America should order from CAP using the same CYBER22 coupon code for faster and cheaper shipping. Customers in Canada should head to the UTP site where the prices will reflect the 50% discount, no coupon needed.

Shop now because the sale ends tomorrow, November 30, at 11:59 pm Eastern time.

How Oscar Wilde Helped John D’Emilio Come Out

Today is National Coming Out Day. We offer an excerpt from historian John D’Emilio’s new book Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood, in which he talks about his own coming out while he was a college student at Columbia in the 1960s.

The summer of 1967, I had a job at the Federal Bureau of Customs, whose offices were in Lower Manhattan near Battery Park. The job was available through a federal Great Society program designed to provide work experience for college students. In my case, the job was a farce. Assigned to the personnel division, I was pointed by my supervisor to a long row of filing cabinets containing the personnel folders of every bureau employee and was told to put them “in order.” He didn’t provide any substance for the phrase, and so I began arranging the files alphabetically and putting the materials in each file in chronological order. Soon, I was taking longer and longer lunch hours, and no one seemed to notice. I used those midday breaks to explore a part of Manhattan that was unfamiliar to me—the streets of the financial district, the waterfront at Manhattan’s southern tip, the huge construction site from which the World Trade Center would soon rise. And as I walked, I looked. Nothing ever emerged from that cruising, since all of us were on lunch hour and could not retreat anywhere for a sexual encounter. But it did confirm in my head that this was the path I was on.

After nine months in a dormitory, living at home that summer was not easy. I couldn’t talk to Mom and Dad about anything that mattered to me. Politics, religion, and, of course, sex: none of it was safe ground. The dinner conversation about family happenings that had so engrossed me as a child no longer held my interest. More and more, I found myself staying in Manhattan after work and not getting home until it was almost bedtime. Mom and Dad expected me to account for my whereabouts if I didn’t come home for dinner. There were many evenings for which I did have a story to tell. I often hung out with Regis friends who were back from college for the summer. But more than a few times I had to invent something, since I had stayed in Manhattan to wander the streets looking, and sometimes finding. Besides the Times Square area, I had noticed on one of my movie nights at a theater in the East Fifties that Third Avenue was, perhaps, an even heavier cruising area than Times Square, so it, too, became a hunting ground.

One evening, walking on Third Avenue, my eyes locked with someone. His name was Luis, and, as with Jose, he was a Cuban who had fled the revolution and now worked at the un. He lived nearby and took me to his apartment, where we had sex. But instead of my leaving immediately afterward, which had always been the case with the few experiences that did not involve public sex, Luis invited me to stay for dinner. Maybe because I had now turned a corner and was seeing myself as homosexual, I began talking to Luis about my life. I told him that I was a student at Columbia, that I was hoping to major in religion, that I had always lived in New York. Luis made me comfortable enough that I felt the freedom to share the struggles I was having. He listened patiently, talked about the hard times he had gone through earlier in life, and assured me that things would change. I so wanted to believe him. He gave me his phone number and encouraged me to call; as I was about to leave, he signaled to me to wait. He walked to a bookcase in his living room and pulled out a thin volume.

“You should read this,” he said as he placed it in my hands. “A friend gave it to me a few years ago. It offered a comfort that I badly needed as I was struggling with my love for a man. Maybe it will help you too.”

The book was De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde. I knew a little about Wilde. His play The Importance of Being Earnest was a standard work on literature reading lists. He was the only historical figure I was aware of who was identified as homosexual, and I knew that the scandal surrounding this had resulted in a prison sentence. I thanked Luis, we kissed goodbye, and I took the subway home to the Bronx.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The conversation with Luis had left me awash in feelings. Finally, I got up and tiptoed quietly to the living room, closed the door to the hallway so that I wouldn’t wake anyone, and turned on a light. I opened De Profundis, began reading, and finished it in a single sitting. Fifty years later, I still place it among the most profound pieces of writing I have ever encountered. Nothing else that I have read changed my life to the extent that it did. Yes, James Baldwin made me realize that there were men who desired men. David Hume made me question whether God existed. But Oscar Wilde’s words allowed me to see my sexual desires in an entirely new light and to imagine a life with integrity.

Written while he was still in prison and composed as a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis detailed the story of Wilde’s love for Douglas and how it led ultimately to his trial and  imprisonment. Wilde is unsparing in his criticism of Douglas. And yet, even though his passion for Douglas brought complete ruin, De Profundis is very much a paean to love and, surprisingly, one that Wilde grounded in the story of Jesus. To Jesus, according to Wilde, “love was the first secret of the world.” His power resided in the way that he projected love wherever he went. The lessons Wilde drew from the moral vision of Jesus spoke to me directly. “The real fool,” he wrote, “is he who does not know himself.” Wilde’s peroration, repeated many times in the course of the text—“whatever is realized is right”—was like a clarion call. I read it as a command to recognize the rightness of my deepest feelings. Reading those pages, I considered for the first time that loving men might be morally good. It is barely an exaggeration to say that De Profundis saved my life.

At one point in the text, Wilde declared that “to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.” Anyone aspiring to a Christlike life “must be entirely and absolutely himself.” His frequent invocation of Jesus allowed me to embrace my sexual desires and still retain a sense of myself as an ethical being. It was possible both to be gay and to live out the values that I had so deeply internalized in my Catholic upbringing, even if the church as an institution no longer had a place in my life.

One sign of the indisputable power of Wilde’s words over me is that, a few days later, I “came out” for the first time, though I didn’t yet have those words to describe what I was doing.

In a letter that I addressed to both Bob and Vinny in seminary, I wrote that I was now  approaching life and religion “from a path previously unseen.” I described my reading of De Profundis and how it had wrenched my soul. But the melody of Wilde’s message, and especially his presentation of Jesus as love personified, also was like a revelation. As I explained to them, it was allowing me to recognize that the attractions I had long felt for men, but had never revealed except to priests and a psychologist, were natural to me. Acknowledging some of the encounters that I’d had in the last two months, I brashly declared, “I don’t feel guilty anymore.” But although I was opening up to them, I asked them not to reveal it to anyone else. “Of course, it’s still a secret thing,” I wrote in closing. “It has to be.”

John D’Emilio is Emeritus Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of many books, including The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture, also published by Duke University Press; Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin; Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970​; and Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives. Save 30% on Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood with coupon code E22DEMIL.

New Books in October

Fall is in full swing, so curl up with a hot drink, a cozy sweater, and a new book! Check out our October releases.

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is John D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood and Columbia University to New York’s hidden gay male subculture and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. You can catch John D’Emilio discussing his book at the Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City later this month.

Exploring her attraction to tininess and the stories of those who share it, Barbara Browning offers a series of charming short essays that plumb what it means to ponder the minuscule in The Miniaturists.

Gavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds in No Machos or Pop Stars, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music. Butt will launch his book at an exciting event in Leeds this month, featuring performances by Scritti Politti and The Mekons77.

In Fragments of Truth, Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Canada established in 2008 to review the history of the Indian Residential School system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children.

Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present in Black Disability Politics. Schalk launches her book at an event at the Ford Foundation in New York City on October 26.

In Changing the Subject, Srila Roy traces the impact of neoliberalism on gender and sexuality rights movements in the Global South through queer and feminist activism in India. Roy is speaking about her book at The New School and Columbia University later this month.

Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future in the context of financialized capitalism in Trading Futures, arguing that the Christian vocabulary of hope can provide the means to build a future beyond the strictures of capitalism.

Coming from the worlds of cultural anthropology, geography, philosophy, science fiction, poetry, and fine art, editors Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey and the contributors to this volume of The Promise of Multispecies Justice consider the possibility for multispecies justice and speculate on the forms it would take. The authors have developed a multimedia website where you can learn more about this collection.

In Health in Ruins, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero assesses neoliberalism’s devastating effects on a public hospital in Colombia and how health care workers resisted defunding.

Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and its century-long legacy of dispossession in Violent Utopia, placing it in a larger historical and social context of widespread anti-Black racism and segregation in Tulsa and beyond.

In a new revised and expanded twentieth anniversary edition of his classic book Big Game, Small World, sportswriter Alexander Wolff travels the globe in search of what basketball can tell us about the world, and what the world can tell us about the game.

AnaLouise Keating provides a comprehensive investigation of the foundational theories, methods, and philosophies of Gloria E. Anzaldúa in The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook.

Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being.

In Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume I, Obeah, Tracey E. Hucks traces the history of the repression of Obeah practitioners in colonial Trinidad.

And in Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa, Dianne M. Stewart analyzes the sacred poetics, religious imagination, and African heritage of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

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Pride Month Reads

Happy Pride Month! We’re proud to share some of our recent titles that focus on queer studies, trans studies, and LGBTQ+ histories.

In Gay Liberation after May ’68, first published in France in 1974 and appearing here in English for the first time, Guy Hocquenghem details the rise of the militant gay liberation movement and argues that revolutionary movements must be rethought through ideas of desire and sexuality. The book is translated by Scott Branson and includes an introduction by Gilles Deleuze.

Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition, a special issue of GLQ edited by Jesse A. Goldberg and Marquis Bey, considers prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition.

In Black Trans Feminism, Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.

Shola von Reinhold’s lush queer novel LOTE won several prizes in the UK and is finally available to U.S. readers. Novelist Torrey Peters calls it “a totally fresh, funny, urgent iteration.” The perfect summer read!

In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of Black queer politics, culture, and history in the 1980s as they emerged out of radical Black lesbian activism and writing.

Marlon B. Ross explores the figure of the sissy as central to how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated black masculinity from the 1880s to the present in Sissy Insurgencies.

In Atmospheres of Violence, Eric A. Stanley examines the forms of violence levied against trans/queer and gender nonconforming people in the United States and shows how, despite the advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past, forms of anti-trans/queer violence is central to liberal democracy and state power.

Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in Queer African Cinemas, showing how these films record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience while at the same time imagining new hopes and possibilities.

In Visual Archives of Sex — a special issue of Radical History Review edited by Heike Bauer, Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton, and Jennifer Tucker — contributors study the visual histories of sex by examining symbols, images, film, and other visual forms ranging from medieval religious icons to twenty-first-century selfies. They argue that engaging BIPOC, antiracist, queer, and feminist perspectives of the past is vital to understanding the complex historical relationships between sex and visual culture.

Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures in Selfie Aesthetics.

Artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies of safety and survival in Poetic Operations.

The t4t Issue is a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly edited by Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino. Originating in Craigslist personals to indicate a trans person seeking another trans person, the term “t4t” has come to describe not only circuits of desire and attraction but also practices of trans solidarity and mutual aid. Contributors to this issue investigate the multiple meanings associated with t4t, considering both its potential and its shortcomings.

In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of the queer, disabled, Zionist writer Jessie Sampter (1883–1938), whose body and life did not match typical Zionist ideals and serves as an example of the complex relationships between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality by studying feminist film, video, and science fiction literature.

Queer Companions by Omar Kasmani theorizes the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important Sufi site by examining the affective and intimate relationship between the site’s pilgrims and its patron saint.

New Books in June

Summer is almost here! Kick off the new season with some of the great new titles we have coming out in June.

Perfect for vacation reading, Shola von Reinhold’s decadent queer literary debut LOTE immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Examining the reception of evolutionary biology, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, Donovan O. Schaefer theorizes the relationship between thinking and feeling by challenging the conventional wisdom that they are separate in Wild Experiment.

In Gridiron Capital, Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural, historical, and social dynamics that have made American football so central to Samoan culture.

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction in The Emancipation Circuit, tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South.

In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron, Suzana Sawyer traces Ecuador’s lawsuit against the Chevron corporation for the environmental devastation resulting from its oil drilling practices, showing how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil.

In Discovering Fiction, eminent Chinese novelist Yan Lianke offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing.

The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground, edited by Ash Amin and Michele Lancione, develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities.

In Myriad Intimacies, Lata Mani oscillates between poetry and prose, genre and form, register and voice, and secular and sacred to meditate on the ways in which everyone and everything exists in mutually constitutive interrelations.

Working at the intersection of urban theory, Black studies, and decolonial and Islamic thought, AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political in The Surrounds.

Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia in her new book In the Shadow of the Palms, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant.

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New Books in May

As we approach the end of the semester, kick off your summer reading with some of our great new titles! Here’s what we have coming out in May.

Shannen Dee Williams provides a comprehensive history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States in Subversive Habits, tracing how Black sisters’ struggles were central to the long African American freedom movement.

The contributors to Re-Understanding Media, edited by Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh, advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends.

In Queer Companions, Omar Kasmani theorizes the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important Sufi site by examining the affective and intimate relationship between the site’s pilgrims and its patron saint.

In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the Latin American Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon, showing how it failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China.

In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing.

Allan E. S. Lumba explores how the United States used monetary policy and banking systems to justify racial and class hierarchies, enforce capitalist exploitation, and counter movements for decolonization in the American colonial Philippines in Monetary Authorities.

In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of the queer, disabled, Zionist writer Jessie Sampter (1883–1938), whose body and life did not match typical Zionist ideals and serves as an example of the complex relationships between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

Jodi Kim examines how the United States extends its sovereignty across Asia and the Pacific in the post-World War II era through a militarist settler imperialism that is leveraged on debt in Settler Garrison.

In Legal Spectatorship, Kelli Moore traces the political origins of the concept of domestic violence through visual culture in the United States, showing how it is rooted in the archive of slavery.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Queer African Cinema

Today we’re excited to present a guest post by Lindsey Green-Simms, author of the new book Queer African Cinemas. The book examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, showing how these films record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience while at the same time imagining new hopes and possibilities. Lindsey B. Green-Simms is Associate Professor of Literature at American University and author of Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa.

In my new book, Queer African Cinemas, I look at all the different ways queer African films have registered various forms of resistance and have shown the multiple ways that queer African subjects love, dream, negotiate, flee, and craft new worlds. The following 10 fiction films capture the difficulty of queer existence but also highlight the potentials for queer life-building and joy.  Some of them are difficult to find, but some can be streamed on platforms that many readers will be able to access.  All of the films ask us to listen carefully to subtle and quiet modes of resistance and to think about queer Africans in all of their complexity, not simply as objects of homophobia.

Dakan, dir. Mohamed Camara (Guinea, 1997)

Dakan, the first Black African feature film to depict homosexuality, was a film that was, in many ways, ahead of its time. It opens with two high school boys, Manga and Sory, making out in Sory’s red convertible. But neither Manga nor Sory’s parents approve of their relationship. Manga is sent off to a traditional healer and then eventually married off to Oumou, a white woman. Sory, who is expected to take over his father’s lucrative business, is also married off to a woman. Dakan premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and screened primarily abroad where audiences in the diaspora were often elated to see representation of queer love on the continent. But when Dakan screened at FESPACO —the famous pan-African film festival held every other year in Burkina Faso—Camara had to change hotels every day and leave screenings early to avoid being beaten up. Likewise, when the film screened in Guinea, where local imams issued a fatwa against him, Camara narrowly escaped an angry crowd. But, despite the challenges Camara faced funding, casting, and screening the film, Dakan ends defiantly and holds out hope for the possibility that queer African love can exist, and perhaps even flourish, on the continent. It is available for streaming on Amazon, Vimeo, and Kanopy.

Karmen Geï, dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka (Senegal, 2001)

Karmen Geï is another pioneering queer West African film, though its queerness is not necessarily central to the plot. Karmen Geï is a Senegalese adaptation of Georges Bizet’s famous 1875 opera Carmen. In Ramaka’s film, the first ever African adaptation, the music is not opera but Afro-jazz with a host of famous African-American and Senegalese musicians creating a pulsing, improvisational jazz and drumming score. Moreover, in Karmen Geï Carmen is not an outlaw from Southern Spain caught in a love triangle between two men. Instead, Karmen is a Senegalese woman, recently released from prison after seducing the female warden, who loves both men and women but who, like all Carmens, insists on her own freedom even though it costs her. And though this artful and somewhat opaque film does not necessarily say anything directly about what it’s like to live as a queer person in Senegal, it is a beautiful portrait of refusal, love, waywardness, and eccentricity. It can be streamed on Kanopy, Vimeo and YouTube.

Stories of Our Lives, dir. Jim Chuchu (Kenya, 2014)

The Nest Collective and Jim Chuchu did not set out to make Kenya’s first queer film but that’s precisely what happened. In 2013 members of the Nest Collective, a multidisciplinary art collective, had been traveling around Kenya collecting stories from queer-identified people for a book project called Stories of Our Lives.  They decided to turn a few of the stories into short films to show to the community of people they had interviewed. One of these shorts was shown to a curator of the Toronto International Film Festival who then asked if the Nest Collective could make more vignettes for a feature-length film. The collective agreed, and Stories was slated to show in Toronto before the film was even finished. The Stories of Our Lives film anthology consists of five emotionally charged black and white vignettes that show the different ways queer Kenyans live and love. Unfortunately, though the film was met with well-deserved critical praise internationally, it was banned in Kenya and has not been screened there. It can be rented on Vimeo.

Rafiki, dir. Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya, 2018)

Rafiki is another film that was banned in Kenya, though a judge did lift the ban for seven days so that the film could be eligible for an Oscar. Theaters in the country were so packed that Rafiki became the second highest grossing Kenyan film. Based on Monica Arac de Nyeko’s prize-winning short story “Jambula Tree,” Rafiki tells the story of two girls from opposing politicians’ families who fall in love in Nairobi. The film is a gorgeous homage to the colors, sounds, and street life in Nairobi as Kahiu fills the screen with pinks, purples, and bright green and introduces us to Kenyan musicians, fashion labels, and artists. The film stands out for its vibrancy as well as for its belief in the possibility of young queer love. And though it’s difficult to see in Kenya, outside of its country of origin, it can be found on Amazon, Hulu, ShowTime, and Apple TV to name just a few.

Inxeba, dir. John Trengove (South Africa, 2017)

Inxeba, or The Wound in translation, takes place on a mountain in the Eastern Cape during the Xhosa male circumcision and initiation rites known as ulwaluko. Two of the protagonists are Xolani and Vija, old friends and lovers who resume their secret queer affair every year when they journey to the mountain and act as caregivers to the young boys who come for their initiation. But when Xolani becomes the caregiver to Kwanda, a brazen, out gay boy from Johannesburg, Xolani and Vija’s desire to remain quiet is challenged. This film breaks away from the tradition of situating African queerness primarily in urban settings and asks pressing questions about the role of tradition, the premium placed on being out, and ways of disrupting the violence of heteronormative masculinity. It is currently available to stream (under the title The Wound) on Vudu, Google Play, Apple TV, and Amazon.

Kanarie, dir. Christaan Olwagen (South Africa, 2018)

Kanarie is, like Karmen Geï, a film infused with musical numbers and dance sequences, but its setting and content could not be further from that of Karmen Geï. Kanarie takes place during the South African Border Wars when the apartheid regime fought insurgents in Namibia and Angola.  The war, which began in the 1960s, lasted for decades but Kanarie is set during 1984-1985 when a state of emergency was declared that led to draconian law enforcement and military operation against non-white South Africans. At the beginning of the film Johan Niemand, the small-town Boy George-obsessed protagonist is conscripted into the army and joins the Defense Force Choir, the Kanaries. Despite its heavy topic, the film is a quirky coming out story, full of 1980s pop music, set in the most unlikely of spaces, and it takes the audience on a complicated journey with Johan as he tries to understand both his own sexuality and what it means to be a white, gay South African serving in the apartheid government’s Defense Force. It is currently available to stream on the Roku Channel, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, Apple TV, and Tubi.

Moffie, dir Oliver Hermanus (South Africa, 2019)

(Screenshot: YouTube/ Portobello Productions)

Moffie is set slightly earlier than Kanarie but is also about a white gay South African boy who discovers his queer identity after being conscripted into the army. However, Moffie, an adaptation of André Carl van der Merwe’s semiautobiographical novel, has none of the lightness of Kanarie and follows the protagonist, Nicholas Van der Swart, through his grueling training and active duty in a particularly violent counterinsurgency unit. Even Hermanus himself admits that the film is triggering and brutal as it’s intended to depict the multiple ways the military dehumanized non-white and non-straight bodies. Thematically, the film also serves as a prequel to Hermanus’s 2011 film Skoonheid about a closeted Afrikaner man (formerly in the Defense Force) who becomes violent with another man. It is currently available to stream on Hulu, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon, and Apple TV.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore, dir Tope Oshin (Nigeria, 2018)

We Don’t Live Here Anymore is the first feature-length film produced by The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs), a Nigeria-based human rights non-profit that focuses on sexual minorities. We Don’t Live Here Anymore is the second film TIERs produced – the first was the short film Hell or High Water, which is available for free on YouTube. With both films, TIERs worked with stars and directors from Nollywood, the popular Nigerian film industry, to combat homophobia and elicit compassion both for gay characters and their family members. We Don’t Live Here Anymore centers on the fallout after two teenage boys are caught together on school grounds. Rather than supporting their sons, the parents flounder. One mother decides to use her wealth and connections to paint her son as a victim. The other fails to get her son to safety soon enough. In many ways, the film is less about the two boys and more about the mothers, and it serves as a cautionary tale, as many Nollywood films do, about the failure to stand up to both internal and external homophobia. It can be streamed on Amazon and Google Play.

Walking with Shadows, dir. Aoife O’Kelly (Nigeria, 2020)

Walking with Shadows is a co-production between TIERs and Oya Media, the production company of the former Nigerian talk show host Funmi Iyanda. Walking with Shadows is the adaptation of Jude Dibia’s novel of the same name, the first Nigerian novel to focus on a gay protagonist. Both Iyanda and former TIERs executive director Olumide Makanjuola had long dreamed of making Dibia’s groundbreaking book into a film and when they teamed up to do so they made a beautiful rendition of this classic coming out story. The plot is straight-forward: when the successful businessman Adrian Ebele Njoko is outed by a co-worker seeking revenge, Adrian must re-evaluate his life and his relationship with his wife, family, and friends. Like Dibia’s book, the film asks audiences who might otherwise reject queer people to think about them as fully human and also provides the type of gay protagonist that is rarely represented in Nigerian film and literature. The film screened to packed theaters at the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF) in Lagos and toured globally but has not yet been made available on streaming platforms.

Ifé, dir. Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim (Nigeria, 2020) 

(Screenshot from PM News)

Ifé is a 35-minute short film, produced in partnership with Pamela Adie’s The Equality Hub, a Lagos-based organization focusing on the rights of female sexual minorities. (Adie also made a coming out documentary, Under the Rainbow, about her own life). Ifé begins with the titular character preparing for a date with Adaora, a woman she has not yet met in person. Adaora and Ifé immediately connect and their one-night date stretches into three intimate days. Unlike other queer Nigerian films, Ifé is not about how these women’s love might affect their larger community, nor is it a film in which anyone is trying to save anyone from the supposed sins of homosexuality. Rather, Ifé, the first Nigerian film written, produced, and directed by queer women, focuses on queer women’s intimacy when it gets to exist, for just a moment, in a protected space, safely inside the walls of Ifé’s home. Ifé, along with Adie’s first film, can be rented on the Equality Hub’s own streaming platform.

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