Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

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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, Gopinath stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian and Latinx artists such as Sheba Chhachhi, Allan deSouza, Tracey Moffat and Akram Zaatari. Unruly Visions 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 create 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.

“A tremendous advance over the current scholarship analyzing visuality, affect, and South-to-South queer diasporic artistic expression, Unruly Visions charts new cartographies of diasporic connections that provide a fresh orientation to our understanding of settler colonialism, empire, and racialization. Gayatri Gopinath’s book is a singular achievement that will have a profound impact within queer studies, indigenous and diaspora studies, visual studies, and aesthetics.”
—Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West

“A wonderfully detailed examination of queer diasporic films and visual art projects, this book explores how critical regionalism can interrupt conventional conceptions of local/global and metropolis/diaspora distinctions. Gayatri Gopinath’s concept of a ‘queer cartographic imaginary’ resists neat categories and generalizations, offering an eclectic range of case studies—queer diaspora from Kerala and the Middle East, Latinx and U.S. cultures of immigration, and indigeneity.”
—Ann Cvetkovich, author of Depression: A Public Feeling

GAYATRI GOPINATH is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She works at the intersections of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies and diaspora studies.