Gopinath, Gayatri. “Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora”, Duke University Press, 2018.
Affect, Archive, Region and Aesthetics
Amos Lassen
Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to looking at investigations of diaspora and visuality and traces the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. She includes film, fine art, poetry, and photography and conceptualizes aesthetic practices of queer diaspora showing the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial residence and displacement as a product of diasporic trajectories.
Ignoring “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 sets up unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists (Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza). She shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality and provides “new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.”
We see new cartographies of diasporic connections that provide a fresh look of our understanding of settler colonialism, empire, and racialization. This is a detailed examination of queer diasporic films and visual art projects that show how critical regionalism can interrupt conventional conceptions of local/global and metropolis/diaspora distinctions.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Archive, Region, Affect, Aesthetics 1
- Queer Regions: Imagining Kerala from the Diaspora 19
- Queer Disorientations, States of Suspension 59
- Diaspora, Indigeneity, Queer Critique 87
- Archive, Affect, and the Everyday 125
Epilogue. Crossed Eyes: Toward a Queer-Sighted Vision 169
Notes 177
Bibliography 213
Index 217