The United States is #theworst at dealing with this pandemic. Anyway, on to pleasant thoughts.
Current reading includes The Context by Alexandro Segade, X-23 by Mariko Tamaki, and Frottage by Keguro Macharia. I’ll be talking about The Context on a panel (via Zoom) on August 2, 4:00pm Pacific! Register there.
Frottage is an incredible work of Black & queer* studies! I put the asterisk there because this book does some necessary work that troubles sexuality, intimacy, gender, normativity, and intellectual projects across the planet without necessarily being queer or doing what queer means. I have long held the hypothesis that Blackness means more than what “queer” as a modifier can do on its own, e.g., there’s value to a concept of Black diaspora that includes what’s called described as queer within and in relation to that context over and above what a concept of queer diaspora can say/do without Blackness. This book has got some crucial insight into the messy, horrible, violent connotations of proximity and contact, sometimes coinciding with sexuality, that characterize Black people’s movements in the world. It interrogates exploitation, subjection, erasure, and all that, those dilemmas we claim to prioritize through critique that we honestly just barrell through most of the time in order to get to the perverse. And it’s got everything: a substantive treatment of Batouala, more Claude McKay (the most undiscovered Negro of the 20th century, I swear), demonstrations (finally) of what intimacy and sexual-racial knowledge/desiring-production have to do with nationalism in a decolonial situation–in Kenya. I have questions, but I’m not all the way done articulating them yet. One of them is familiar, though: why can’t we do this with the US?
Meanwhile, walking the dog has been one of my favorite everyday activities since before the pandemic, and it continues to be. We’ve had a good time guarding the neighborhood, which is what I assume he views as his job. My job this summer, as far as I understand it, is to read comics, move out of my former office in preparation for the move to Cali 2021, and wear a mask.
