There's a Disco Ball Between Us

In <i>There's a Disco Ball Between Us</i> 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.