RACHEL ELLIS NEYRA
June 6, 2015
Queer Indertermanacy, Black (Im)pernance,
Disposession, Survival
Rachel Ellis Neyra invites writerly disruption to the “officially subsidized” archive of assimilationist, or whitened, desire: exploited in the present and extorted of their futures, black, brown, and queer bodies are held in vogue yet under imminent threat of possible attack. We will imagine not only how “not to be caught alone under duress,” how not to be without each other, but also how to feel fucking good with what flows between us. With vernacular materials, the stuff of children’s games and school houses, and policing – graphite, white chalk, water, glue, our hands, the subtle sound of etching on walls – we will make a momentarily shared language for “everything we love to survive dispossession." Black, brown, and queer bodies, then, become sites of abundant emotional addressability in the world as they signify affective excess: they are sometimes desirable and other times disruptive, always awaiting regulation. Exploited in the present and extorted of futures, black, brown, and queer bodies are marked by the demand to sound out expectedly sensational comportment – held in vogue yet under imminent threat of possible attack. An exchange must be made: what else might presence sound and feel like?
Photography by Stephanie Orentas
Professor Ellis Neyra writes in the fields of Caribbean, African diaspora, and U.S. Latinx studies. Trained in poetics of the Americas and Critical Theory, Ellis Neyra focuses as a scholar on literature, especially poetic forms and their social and political histories, as well as music, cinema, and performance. They are as interested in the possibilities for thought that emerge between aesthetic forms and literary genres as much as they are in their zones of critical impossibility--impasses, negativity, and irresolvable ethical quandaries. Ellis Neyra has additional interests in Third Cinema, Cine Novo, Cine Imperfecto, theories of translation, and deconstruction.