After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Abstract

This book tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, as well as Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, and Nona Faustine, the book considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz alongside scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, the author maps a portrait of performance's capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference. Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, the book moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. Introduction: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free -- Nina Simone and the work of minoritarian performance -- Searching for Danh Vō's mother -- The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres -- Eiko's Entanglements -- Tseng Kwong Chi and the party's end -- Epilogue: 6E.