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The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics
of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to
mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump
years doing what they so often do best: creating politically
engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length
study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise'eke Natasha
Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive
challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and
explore freedom. Tinsley engages 2017-2020 Black femme cultural
production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in
the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of
Janelle Monae and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock's writing for the
television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower,
and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry
and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of
consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic
practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and
sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black
femininity, Tinsley finds-so that Black femmes continue to love
themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.
The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics
of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to
mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump
years doing what they so often do best: creating politically
engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length
study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise'eke Natasha
Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive
challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and
explore freedom. Tinsley engages 2017-2020 Black femme cultural
production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in
the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of
Janelle Monae and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock's writing for the
television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower,
and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry
and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of
consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic
practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and
sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black
femininity, Tinsley finds--so that Black femmes continue to love
themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.
From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending
mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili
pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love,
sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and
fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and
characters, so too does Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and
genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her
background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the
lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black
Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and
African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows
how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers
Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana
Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and
filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire-none of whom identify
as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of
queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for
decolonizing queer studies.
Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke
Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna
Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In
Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations
beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video
Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives. Woven
with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of
African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse,
Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of
black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s
“Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist
critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood
offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with
memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters
on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary
LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video
“Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism
isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle
for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues
and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is
populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and
infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative,
peerless imagery and lyrics. In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s
Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories,
Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is
poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in
America.
In Thiefing Sugar, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry
and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a
rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the
book's title from Dionne Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here,
where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and
subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is
repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between
women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only
recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that
have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer
scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations
and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of
decolonization. Tinsley's interpretations of twentieth-century
literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the
Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history,
violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar,
Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as
neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses.
She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black
feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she
highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate
queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the
closet and "coming out."
From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending
mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili
pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love,
sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and
fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and
characters, so too does Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and
genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her
background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the
lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black
Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and
African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows
how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers
Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana
Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and
filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire-none of whom identify
as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of
queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for
decolonizing queer studies.
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