Busy Being Black

I’m in conversation with Rico Norwood, who opens our conversation with a beautiful and important introduction to Isaac Julien’s seminal film Looking for Langston. As well as doing more justice to Looking for Langston’s importance than I could, we open with this introduction because Rico flags an important word “quare”, which – as some of you already know – I have tattooed right across my throat. “Quare” was put forward by E. Patrick Johnson, the fairy godfather of Black queer studies, in his 2001 essay, “Quare studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother”. Part of what animates Johnson’s theoretical intervention is an understanding that Black queer people and the non-queer people who birth, nurture and raise us, often have much more to offer the world than we’re given credit for. It is a “quareness” that energises my own cultural and intellectual inquiry and which brings me and Rico together, both as friends and conversation partners. Today we explore Looking for Langston’s ongoing importance, the role cultural institutions like the BFI play in either gatekeeping or providing access to our quare cultural canons and how politics of respectability and representation continue to hinder our collective cultural memory. And together we attempt to answer an enduring question, one addressed often on Busy Being Black, how do we ensure that work that could be so important to our liberation isn’t so continually withheld from us? About Rico Norwood Rico Norwood (they/them) is an American Film and Video Game researcher out of the University of Southampton, who currently resides in London and Berlin. They hail from Houston, Texas but received their undergraduate degree in Mass Communications from Xavier University of New Orleans and their M.A. in Media Studies at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. Their primary academic concerns are Black Queer Art and historical narratives through films, as well as Video Game studies with regards to race, gender, sexuality, and their development. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My admiration of Travis Alabanza runs deep. They were one of the first people to say yes to me and Busy Being Black at a time of tremendous uncertainty for me, and our 2018 conversation remains a firm favourite with listeners. The wisdom and insights Travis shared on art, gender, race and self-awareness are as relevant and salient today as then. I find them refreshing, not least for the ways they engage with the spectacle of curiosity that confronts them and trans folks daily. Travis reproaches with sass, or critique or silence: a questioning back that asks, ultimately, whether the rest of us know the role we play in the ongoing hostilities facing trans people. But Travis’ work is not only, always or forever work about their experience as a trans person in a transphobic world, nor do they create to explain; which is perhaps most beautifully expressed in a statement made to Travis by writer and friend Kuchenga: "This is for us, baby, not for them." At the heart of Travis’ new book,...

2015 and 2016 were big years for me: in April 2015, I was shocked into my political awakening by the Baltimore riots, which erupted after the funeral of Freddie Gray. The rage and grief expressed through the riots inspired me to action: how might I be part of a solution? And a year later, in 2016, I stumbled on No Tea, No Shade, an anthology of nineteen essays from scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. No Tea, No Shade helped focus the fire stoked by the riots towards something generative, rigorous and tender.Busy Being Black is a product of these two events — and a life of searching and questioning before, during and since. So, you can imagine how honoured I am to be in conversation with Dr Jafari S. Allen, whose essay "Black/Queer Rhizomatics" opens No Tea, No Shade and was the first piece of Black queer theory I ever read.We discuss his latest book, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectua...

This week, my conversation is with Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist Da’Shaun Harrison. Their new book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness is an important addition in the fields of fat and Black studies, which offers us all necessary knowledge and insights to help improve how we relate to one another and ourselves.In this bonus episode, Da’Shaun and I explore the erotic and how the many barriers society forces us to erect around ourselves, preclude a deeper, necessary and potentially world-ending intimacy.Content warning: sexual violence. Da’Shaun Harrison is based in Atlanta and is the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve long admired the work of Da’Shaun L. Harrison. Like many of those I’ve come to encounter and adore over the past few years, Da’Shaun’s work came across my timeline on social media and their incisive and invigorating intellectual offerings have had me hooked since. Da’Shaun is a Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist, and in their debut book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness, they argue that to live in a body that is both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that limits us in ways we may have never considered. In our conversation today, Da’Shaun expands on the connection between anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, explains how diet culture persists as a tool of social control and offers up ways of thinking about how the policing each of us might do of our own bodies invariably impacts how we interact with – and even judge – those around us. Like all of the best intellectual work, Da’Shaun’s intervention is...

In the face of the ongoing and various violences experienced by Black women in the UK and across the world, Zinzi Minott wonders why more people don’t ask, “What do Black women’s bodies need?” It’s a question I’ve been sitting with since we recorded our conversation, which includes us exploring what our duty of care is to each other.Zinzi is a dancer, artist and filmmaker and she’s interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage and how the use of the "glitch" can help us to consider notions of racism one experiences through their life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories, highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation. In this sweeping conversation, we explore her work commemorating the Windrush Generation, how we might show up better and more meaningfully for Black women and how her queerness kicked the doors open to her acceptance of what she calls her weirdness.Zinzi also explores her rearing in both the Pan Africanist and Black Radical traditions, and credits her belief in abolition with helping her hold space for those she encounters among her archival work and artistic practice. As she makes clear, the generations who came before us may not have had the attitudes or the language to hold who we have become in the world, but no one is to be discarded. About Zinzi Minott Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. Zinziexplores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance, and sees her live performance, filmic explorations and made-objects as different but connected manifestations of dance and body-based outcomes and inquiry. ​​BLOODSOUND is Zinzi’s latest work and features newly commissioned prints, moving image, sound and sculpture and expands on her durational film work(s) FI DEM, released annually on 22 June to commemorate the Windrush Generation. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many of us who’ve grown up in the so-called West, our understanding of what belly dancing is has been shaped by colonialism’s legacy. What we’ve learned about or encountered as belly-dancing is actually a white-washed mishmash of several cultures, designed to play into the West’s fascination with and manufactured fear of those designated Muslim.My guest today, Shrouk El-Attar, is an LGBTQ rights campaigner, electronics engineer and belly dancer from Egypt. She is currently working on a piece of interactive art – a belly-dancing robot – which troubles the line between technology and human, and between the east and west. Her desire is to return belly-dancing, or more accurately Egyptian dancing, to its roots – which, she reminds us, has little to do with the movement of the belly and was never a practice restricted to women. Today we explore her experience as an asylum seeker, her fascination with technology and the moment she learned the people in her television set were t...

The late Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there.”And it is down there, among roots and earth, that Black trans gaming designer, archivist and artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is looking for our Black trans ancestors—those whose lives and stories have been lost to history and thus our collective memory. Danielle believes we are each responsible for someone in the earth, and through her work, calls us to interrogate the roles we play in the ongoing violence directed towards our trans siblings. Her approach to this interrogation brings together AI and game design, and places us in situations where we have to make choices—choices that can feel impossible. And that is the point. In our conversation today, we explore how she provides space and means for the expression of multiple Black trans essences; disrupting ideas about what an archive is, what we ...

I met Raven Gill in March 2020 at the Equality and Justice Alliance convening in Saint Lucia, just before our countries went into their respective lockdowns. We became fast friends. She is an outspoken and forthright activist, who does essential and life-sustaining work with trans and non binary Bajans through the civil society organisation she founded, Butterfly Barbados. In our conversation, we explore how she and the communities she fights for have navigated the challenges of Covid-19, the toll the weight of responsibility has taken on her over the past two years and how the positive image Barbados has earned on the global stage recently obscures some harsher realities for trans and non-binary Bajans. And she shares some of her more personal reckonings, including learning what she needs from her friendships, the chosen family she has gathered around her, and what — or rather who — is bringing her joy. About Raven Gill Raven Gill is a community organiser and activist and the founder of Butterfly Barbados, which advocates for transgender and non-binary Bajans. She works with the Barbados Family Planning Association, the Ministry of Health and with organisations regionally and internationally in order to redress and address the erasure of issues impacting trans people. Barbados is one of 54 countries in the Commonwealth, many of which still have colonial-era laws on their books that enable the discrimination against and persecution of LGBTQ people. And Butterfly Barbados is a member of The Commonwealth Equality Network is a network of 60-plus organisations working to uphold the human rights of LGBTQ people across the Commonwealth. UK-based charity Kaleidoscope Trust is host to the Network’s Secretariat. Kaleidoscope Trust believes the UK has an important role to play in redressing colonial era wrongs and works with partner organisations across the Commonwealth to provide funding for programmes to both sustain and liberate LGBTQ communities. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I’m in conversation with Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets – his New York Times best-selling debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men.In this bonus episode, Robert reads an excerpt The Prophets, entitled “New Covenant”. Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer and thinker, and the creator and curator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Essence and the Paris Review. About Busy Being Black Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming. Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and c...