“The challenge here,” José Esteban Muñoz writes in an essay on the LA punk band The Germs, “is to look to queerness as a mode of ‘being-with’ that defies social conventions and conformism and is innately heretical yet still desirous for the world, actively attempting to enact a commons that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed through logics and practices of exploitation.”
Tavia Nyong’o will lecture on José Muñoz’s book The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance which Muñoz was completing at the time of his death and his thoughts about the color brown as a certain ‘ground’ of color. Nyong’o writes, in “Muñoz’s conception, brown turns out to have less than might be expected to do with race, although the talk about ‘the browning of America’ will factor in.” Nyong’o shares Muñoz’s insistence on the political necessity of sensing the world from the perspective of queer and brown bodies. Nyong’o posits queerness in his own writing as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in his approach to a broad range of topics, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema.
Muñoz was a Cuban American academic, who taught and wrote about performance, visual culture, queer and critical theory.
Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African-American Studies, American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University. His research interests include the ethics & aesthetics of social & cultural analysis. His books include: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (U Minnesota, 2009), which won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theater and performance studies, and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018). Nyong’o co-edits the journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press, with David Sartorius (U Maryland).