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In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms-which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora-reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Archive, Region, Affect, Aesthetics 1
1. Queer Regions: Imagining Kerala from the Diaspora 19
2. Queer Disorientations, States of Suspension 59
3. Diaspora, Indigeneity, Queer Critique 87
4. Archive, Affect, and the Everyday 125
Epilogue. Crossed Eyes: Toward a Queer-Sighted Vision 169
Notes 177
Bibliography 213
Index 217
About the author
Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.
Summary
Gayatri Gopinath traces the interrelation of affect, aesthetics, and diaspora through an exploration of a wide range of contemporary queer visual cultural forms by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza.
