In Black, Quare, and Then to Where jennifer susanne leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Maât the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Maât took into account the historical and cultural context of each human’s life, thus encompassing nuances of politics, race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that Maât should serve as a foundation for reconfiguring Black sexual ethics, leath applies ancient Egyptian moral codes to quare ethics of the erotic, expanding what relationships and democratic practices might look like from a contemporary Maâtian perspective. She also draws on Pan-Africanism and examines the work of Alice Walker, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheikh Anta Diop, Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, and others. She shows that together, these thinkers and traditions inform and expand the possibilities of Maâtian justice with respect to Black sexual experiences. As a moral force, leath contends, Maât opens new possibilities for mapping ethical frameworks to understand, redefine, and imagine justices in the United States.

DIVA consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity./div

While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project. The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies. Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace

"...brilliant..."--Malcolm Gladwell, Author of Blink "The writings for which this essay is offered as a Prologue consumed him from the mid-1950s throughthe end of his life in 1991. Knowing it was his ìlifework,î Tomkins conflated ìlifeî and ìwork,î reifyingthe superstition that its completion would equal death and refusing to release for publication long-completedmaterial. He knew the risks associated with this obsessive, neurotic behavior, and the results were as bad aspredicted. The first two volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC) were released in 1962 and 1963,Volume III in 1991 shortly before he succumbed to a particularly virulent strain of small cell lymphoma, andVolume IV a year after his death. This last book contains Tomkinsís understanding of neocortical cognition,ideas that are even now exciting, but until this current publication of his work as a single supervolume, almostnobody has read it. The bulk of his audience had died along with the enthusiasm generated by his ideas. Bigscience is now more a matter of big machines and unifocal discoveries as the basis for pars pro toto reasoningthan big ideas based on the assembly and analysis of all that is known. Tomkins ignored nothing from anyscience past or present that might lead him toward a more certain understanding of the mind. Every idea,every theory deserved attention if only because significant observations can loiter in blind alleys."--From the Prologue by Donald L. Nathanson, MD Volume 1 of Springer's magisterial new two-volume edition of Tomkins's magnum opus comprises The Positive Affects and The Negative Affects.