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Queering Blackness: Non-Binary Black Representations in Post-Obama Popular Cultures

 Part 2

Université Paul Valéry — Montpellier 3

Friday, June 16, 2023

St Charles Building, room 126

One-day Symposium organized by EMMA (Études Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone)

Representations of African American subjects are marked by historical stereotypes long documented by historians of representations, notably the American film historians Thomas Cripps and Donald Bogle, the British sociologist Stuart Hall, and the British film historian Richard Dyer. These early studies were enriched by numerous critical writings questioning the binarity of sexual and gender representations, particularly those of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Michelle Parkerson, E. Patrick Johnson, James Small, C. Riley Snorton, Mia Mask and Alfred L. Martin. These analyses are most often interested in criticizing the most popular commercial productions, both to denounce their limits and to identify the advances that reflect the most recent theories.

The election of Barack Obama to the American presidency has ushered in a so-called "post-racial" era, a term echoed in the title of bell hooks' latest book (Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, 2013), in which the racial binarity rooted in American history is strongly questioned in an intersectional reflection that probes all forms of binarity. We see it in the cinema with the major influence of a character like Black Panther, muse of Afro-futurism surrounded by an army of Amazons in the rejection of toxic masculinity attributed to the eponymous movement of the seventies; we hear it in the music industry with the growing notoriety of the openly gay and distinctly eccentric artist Lil Nas X. This phenomenon is spreading to all popular media, from television and its hit series to comics and video games.

It is from this observation of representations of black identities, which question any form of binarity and operate intersectional deployments within African American popular cultures, that the main question at the origin of this project emerges. Based on papers about these representations in the popular arts, accessible to a large majority as well as within the Black American community, this one-day conference aims to examine the evolution of these representations over the past ten years and the obvious efforts to move away from the binary normative representations still attributed to U.S. racial minorities—more so than to the so-called dominant white majority.

The first part of this conference was organized within the framework of the TransCrit Research Unit (in partnership with the EMMA Research Unit) on November 17, 2022, at Paris 8 University. It ws part of the research axis "Imagining Communities." The nature of the topic invited interdisciplinary papers from arts studies, civilization, sociology, gender studies, and more.

Join us live at Site Saint-Charles (please send an email) or via Zoom.