In There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls "Black gay habits of mind." In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.

An Invitation  ix
Introduction. Pastness Is a Position  1
I. A Stitch in Space Time. The Long 1980s  25
1. The Anthological Generation  27
2. "What It Is I Think They Were Doing, Anyhow"  61
3. Other Countries  76
4. Disco  118
5. Black Nations Queer Nations?  139
II. Black/Queerpolis  165
6. Bonds and Disciplines  167
7. Archiving the Anthological at the Current Conjuncture  192
8. Come  221
9. "Black/Queer Mess" as Methodological Case Study  245
10. Unfinished Work  261
III. Conclusion. Lush Life (in Exile)  295
Acknowledgments  313
Notes  325
Bibliography  379
Index  403

Jafari S. Allen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami and author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, also published by Duke University Press.