Nation

So argues Jafari S. Allen's new book “There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life,” which is discussed here by the author and two other scholars ...

I am profoundly perplexed by this continuing adversity and the unnecessary loss of life that occurs as a result of being seen. The 1995 Black Nations/Queer Nations? conference held in Brooklyn, New York, scaffolds a broader discussion of Black entanglements with nationalism and imperialism. We are on the other side of the cyberspace threshold now. But when I leaned into what Allen calls Black gay habits of mind—which “are inexorably bound to this space-time orientation of living in the present, powerfully conditioned by history, but also attuned to radical possibility”—I remembered who I was and to whom I belonged. For Allen, Black gay life is a refraction of fantasy and action. At times, I wondered if I was grown enough to know these things, or well read enough to show up to this conversation and hang. The disco ball is Allen’s metaphor for the refraction of Black gay life. The limits of nation power and citizenship are on full display. The swell of support for Ukraine continues to gain new layers of complexity. I was born during the long 1980s, when what Black feminist scholar Cathy Cohen calls the boundaries of Blackness were drawn again. But, read today, Allen’s work invites me to imagine this non-national space as a place to live, grieve, and be with each other with dignity. So I wonder: When did everyone become Black and not from any specific nation?