Event: Upcoming DBLAC Author Chat--Monday, October 3 at 11 am EST/6 pm EAT

[ten grrl]

Please join us for the September DBLAC Reading Series Author Chat--Monday, October 3, 2022 at 11 am EST/ 6 pm EAT Kelsey L. Smoot will be in conversation with Dr. Keguro Macharia. They will discuss Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora.

Register Here

About Frottage: Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic.  In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres—psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry—as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure. Purchase Frottage here: https://nyupress.org/9781479865017/frottage/

Keguro Macharia is an independent scholar from Nairobi, Kenya. Macharia’s scholarship explores the relation between difference and freedom across the Black Diaspora, focusing specifically on the seam between Africa and Afro-diaspora. Macharia is the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize. Other writing has appeared in Brick, GLQ, Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, and The Queer African Reader. Macharia blogs at gukira.wordpress.com and is on Twitter as @keguro_.

Kelsey L Smoot (they/he) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William & Mary. Their work explores the process of identity formation, at the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality. He names himself a cultural theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet. Having grown up bicoastal and spending the majority of his adult life in a state of transience, they draw from their eclectic life experiences both deep fear and great optimism regarding what people are capable of. Kelsey seeks to illuminate the experiences of Black queer folks, navigating the contemporary US sociopolitical landscape.