Duke University Press Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

In 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 express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes. Review "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" (11/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "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" (8/3/2020 12:00:00 AM) " 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" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "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" (3/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) " 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" (5/23/2019 12:00:00 AM) " 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" (5/1/2019 12:00:00