There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life

by Jafari S. Allen

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, Academic, LGBT, Music, Ethnography

440 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2022

About the author

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, published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Rubí · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ethnographic labor of love. Such a delight to read and be introduced to Black/gay work of the long 1980s. Will def be one to revisit for me (esp. the chapter on archiving). The conclusion was so beautiful and I’m grateful for Allen’s decision to bring more life into this work by including personal details that eschew the old school anthro detached positionality.

[Sadie Cannova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a cultural anthropology paper and really enjoyed. Super thorough but sometimes the direct address and author style was a bit hard to read. Would link paper but don’t feel like figuring out how