This event is a part of our inaugural series entitled “South of Queer: Blurring the Boundaries of Southern History and Time.” The South is defined as both a distinct region set apart from and representative of the nation, and a heterogeneous collection of localities whose porous borders bleed southward into the Caribbean and Latin America. While this porosity fuels a number of racialized, sexualized and gendered political projects, the South within and beyond the nation also facilitates transnational cultural exchange among bodies marked as not belonging, who occupy a range of positionalities along the categorical lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, etc. Such bodies are important sites of knowledge production that are either illegible as archives themselves and/or relegated to the periphery of or completely erased from traditional (white/heteronormative) repositories.

South of Queer turns to cultural producers whose creative understandings of the queer South push the region’s geographic and imaginary borders. At this event, we’ve invited Rosamond King to speak and perform. Dr. King is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist whose work is deeply informed by the cultures and communities she is part of (including African, Caribbean, American, and queer), by history, and by a sense of play.  Her poetry has been published in more than two dozen journals and anthologies, and the manuscript Rock|Salt|Stone is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. King has performed in diverse venues in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and throughout North America, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dixon Place, Poets House, the African Performance Art Biennial, and the Encuentro Festival. She has also received numerous honors, such as a Fulbright Award and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson, Mellon and Ford Foundations, and the Franklin Furnace Fund. Her scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association best book award. King is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Brooklyn College. Her goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, in that order.

Link to Rosamond King’s website: http://rosamondking.com/home.html