Jafari Allen
Jafari Allen, Ph.D., Columbia University, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. Professor Allen works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness -- in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.
Dr. Allen’s forthcoming critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2009], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis-- most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans—to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, re-interpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” ¡Venceremos? argues that mutually constituting scenes in Havana and Santiago de Cuba-- like semi-private, extra-legal parties of men who have sex with men; HIV education activism; lesbian performance and incipient organizing of women who have sex with women; hip-hop and la monia (US R&B/soul music) parties and concerts; sex labor; cigar “hustling”; and informal Black consciousness raising networks-- represent a gravid space for becoming new revolutionary men and women, with new racial, gender and sexual subjectivities.
His current research project, Once Removed: Queer Alter-natives and the redemption of a transnational Black counter-public, traces the work of Black transgender, lesbian, bisexual gay, and same gender loving artists, activists, organic intellectuals, and everyday people, that, continuing in the insurgent Black intellectual tradition, produce trenchant critique of violence, silence, invisibility and forgetting “at home” [in a number of places throughout the Americas] and create forms of politics and expressive practices which resist oppressive structures of the state and global capital.
