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In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture.
Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza.
Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.
Author: Gayatri Gopinath
Paperback Published November 2018 248 pages
"Unruly Visions demonstrates how, in curating and (re)positioning juxtaposed archives, regions and temporalities, new affective linkages are formed. Sitting at the intersection of queer, affect and area studies, this book peers backwards into queer regional archives with unruly, resistant and keen eyes that look to new modes of curating, writing and scholarship that all see(k) to confound conventional conceptions of local/global and metropolis/diaspora divisions." — Polly Hember, LSE Review of Books
"Gopinath’s arguments are complicated but elegant and powerful. . . . I deeply recommend this well-written and thought-provoking book. We can compellingly travel through the various queer artworks following Gopinath’s guide to destruct contemporary modern normativities, which is surely a much-needed project. Researchers of queer subjects and theory, and humanities scholars and social scientists working on issues of immigration and globalization, as well as laypersons interested in queer diaspora and queer art will enjoy this book. In the end, I found myself inspired by Gopinath to queer everything constantly, including queerness itself." — Weejun Park, Antipode
"Such is the nuanced approach that Gopinath has taken in Unruly Visions that has mobilized conceptual categories such as region, aesthetics and archives, which makes this book a must read. It’s interesting that she mentions that this book is a curation of archives, but here 'curate,' which stems from the Latin root meaning 'to care for,' is not used in the pejorative sense but 'to heal.' It’s this healing of all the disappeared or undiscovered queer articulations in the popular, or, even, the culture of the masses that Gopinath successfully articulates." — Saurabh Sharma, Feminism in India