Jafari Allen spoke Monday at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts' Daniel H. Silberberg Lectures, for which art historians, archaeologists and conservators, specializing in a variety of periods and genres are invited to share their latest research.
Allen is professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and and editor-in-chief of "Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture."
Allen said before the talk that "This Silberberg lecture invites us to look — again and closely — toward a deeper recognition of Black gay intellectual and aesthetic traditions, and the place of the visual (arts and artists) within ‘Black gay habits of mind’ that emerge from the conditions and structures of feeling of the long 1980s.
"Here, through a meditation on visual art and film discussed in my latest book; and the work of brothers Lyle Ashton Harris (photographer) and Thomas Allen Harris (filmmaker, photographer) we consider two of the salient features of Black gay habits of mind: 1 the impulse to collect, ‘save culture’ and archive; and 2 the commitment to represent dynamic difference, multiplicity, and complexity, which I call an ‘anthological’ practice."
Allen's latest book, "There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life," was published by Duke University Press in 2022. A social-cultural anthropologist and critical ethnographer by doctoral training, Dr. Allen’s work pursues generative connections and disarticulations among anthropology, feminist and queer studies, and Black studies, through a re-signification of the methodologies, theories, politics, and habits of mind of each of these sites. Engaged in ethnographic research in Cuba and the Caribbean since 1998, he has transnational research interests in a number of other sites in the Americas. Recent research has also taken him to East Africa and Western Europe. Professor Allen is also the author of "¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba"; editor of "Black/Queer/Diaspora"; and "The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious: Black Feminists, Black Queer Habits of Mind, and the ‘Object’ of Ethnography,” in the forthcoming "Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures," edited by Margot Weiss.
