Jafari Allen
Professor Allen, jointly appointed in the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology, works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness -- in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.
Dr. Allen’s critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2011], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis-- most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans—to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, re-interpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” ¡Venceremos? argues that mutually constituting scenes in Havana and Santiago de Cuba-- like semi-private, extra-legal parties of men who have sex with men; HIV education activism; lesbian performance and incipient organizing of women who have sex with women; hip-hop and la monia (US R&B/soul music) parties and concerts; sex labor; cigar “hustling”; and informal Black consciousness raising networks-- represent a gravid space for becoming new revolutionary men and women, with new racial, gender and sexual subjectivities.
His current research project traces the work of transgender, lesbian, bisexual gay, and same gender loving artists, activists, organic intellectuals, and everyday people who, continuing in the insurgent Black intellectual tradition, produce trenchant critique of violence, silence, invisibility and forgetting “here" and "there," in a number of places throughout the Americas.
Dr. Allen’s critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2011], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis-- most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans—to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, re-interpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” ¡Venceremos? argues that mutually constituting scenes in Havana and Santiago de Cuba-- like semi-private, extra-legal parties of men who have sex with men; HIV education activism; lesbian performance and incipient organizing of women who have sex with women; hip-hop and la monia (US R&B/soul music) parties and concerts; sex labor; cigar “hustling”; and informal Black consciousness raising networks-- represent a gravid space for becoming new revolutionary men and women, with new racial, gender and sexual subjectivities.
His current research project traces the work of transgender, lesbian, bisexual gay, and same gender loving artists, activists, organic intellectuals, and everyday people who, continuing in the insurgent Black intellectual tradition, produce trenchant critique of violence, silence, invisibility and forgetting “here" and "there," in a number of places throughout the Americas.
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