Description
Book SynopsisIn 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
Trade Review
"Unruly Visions is a significant addition to the groundbreaking Perverse Modernities series published by Duke University Press and edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. . . . This book is highly recommended for academic libraries, especially those that serve institutions with heavy emphasis on research in visual studies, contemporary art history, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and diaspora studies." -- Andrew Wang * ARLIS/NA Reviews *
"Unruly Visions demonstrates how, in curating and (re)positioning juxtaposed archives, regions and temporalities, new affective linkages are formed. Sitting at the intersection of queer, affect and area studies, this book peers backwards into queer regional archives with unruly, resistant and keen eyes that look to new modes of curating, writing and scholarship that all see(k) to confound conventional conceptions of local/global and metropolis/diaspora divisions." -- Polly Hember * LSE Review of Books *
"Unruly Visions is a formidable, powerful, and necessary study of queer diasporas that a wide range of readers, from the general public to diaspora studies scholars, will at once find illuminating and profound." -- Shabnam Rathee and Rahul K. Gairola * South Asian Review *
"Gopinath’s arguments are complicated but elegant and powerful. . . . I deeply recommend this well-written and thought-provoking book. We can compellingly travel through the various queer artworks following Gopinath’s guide to destruct contemporary modern normativities, which is surely a much-needed project. Researchers of queer subjects and theory, and humanities scholars and social scientists working on issues of immigration and globalization, as well as laypersons interested in queer diaspora and queer art will enjoy this book. In the end, I found myself inspired by Gopinath to queer everything constantly, including queerness itself." -- Weejun Park * Antipode *
"Gopinath’s theorization of the region offers transgender studies a new analytic to meet the challenge of undoing its US exceptionalism. . . . [Her] reading of regions offers a method to draw connections between multiple regions in the way they disrupt and get folded within nation-states." -- Sayan Bhattacharya * TSQ *
"Unruly Visions provides unique insight into the ways in which aesthetics of queerness provide potentially alternative lenses through which to view the concepts of region and area." -- Hafsa Arain * Asian Journal of Social Science *
"Centering contemporary art of the queer diaspora, Unruly Visions develops a queer optic across regions and across archives in a poignantly affective register, as she offers a blueprint for what aesthetic analysis located within and across diasporas might look and feel like. Crucially, this book proposes a radical relationality, embracing José Muñoz’s utopian horizon of queer possibility." -- Natasha Bissonauth * Women & Performance *
“With the author’s insistence on questioning some of the most widely held and least criticised notions of queer belonging, this text becomes invaluable in considering alternative, deviant futures in our midst. Unruly Visions is to be held as a necessary engagement for those scholars interested in advocating relational and relevant queer theory that seeks out the potential of unexpected and strange affiliations and intimacies against the odds.” -- Lars Olav Aaberg * Feminist Review *
Table 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
