Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature (Critical Insurgencies) - Hardcover

Emilio Amideo (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810143704 ISBN 13: 9780810143708

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2021

Synopsis

In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge.
 
Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.

About this title

About the Author

Emilio Amideo is a research fellow in English language and translation at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810143704
• ISBN 13: 9780810143708
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280