Roderick Ferguson

Cultural Studies Colloquium

Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EST
Buchanan Hall, D005

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Socialism in Black Queer Time: The 1970s and the Erotic Potentials of Radical Politics

 

In the 1970s, various modes of difference were being mobilized to illustrate and expand the symbolic flexibility and the “writerly” potentials of socialism. Here we might think of the politically imaginative work of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the 1978 Socialist-Feminist Conference, the radical queer activist group Gay Liberation Front and so on. This talk will show that black queer activists and artists were central to socialist experimentation of the period. More directly, those activists and artists were part of various projects to revise socialism in accordance with an interest in politicizing homoerotic desires and eroticizing anti-racist and socialist visions. To illustrate the decade’s experimentations with blackness, socialism, and queer desire, the talk reads the writings of Third World Gay Revolution—a 1970 U.S.-based black and Latino socialist group—and Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, a 1991 film about the emergence of soul music in Britain as the context for thinking the convergence of socialist politics, race, and homoeroticism.

 

Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of race and critical theory in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is co-editor with Grace Hong of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011), and author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004) and The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012).

Hosted by Cultural Studies Colloquium.

Sponsored by Cultural Studies, African American Studies Program, University Life, & Interdisciplinary Curriculum Collaborative.

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