In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen
offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of
what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and
lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from
radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He
traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research
and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and
Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations
and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and
cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory,
historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre
Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon
Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates
Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking
and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary
struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue
scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and
fantasies of Black people throughout the world.
