Tongues Untied: Queer Inscriptions, Black Becomings
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Tongues Untied: Queer Inscriptions, Black Becomings
This screening and symposium celebrates the 30th anniversary of Tongues Untied (1989). The film was directed by Marlon T. Riggs and, in his own words, sought to ‘shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference’. The film weaves together documentary footage with poetry, soundscapes and body movement in an effort to articulate the unspeakability of Black gay masculinity muted by and between heteronormativity and white gay culture. This symposium takes Tongues Untied as a provocative inscription of Black queer becoming and explores its timely resonance by bringing together Black queer artists, writers, scholars and activists across generations. It asks what it means to remember and what is at stake in remembering through the frame of an artefact of history or the situated; how can memorialisation be avoided: and time reconceived otherwise than a temporal movement of ‘progress’ and ‘development’? How might Tongues Untied with its emphasis on wounded vulnerability and loving deviance inspire us to speak life towards a different future in entanglement with ‘pasts’ still (to be) lived?
Speakers: Roderick Ferguson (University of Illinois), Gail Lewis (Birkbeck), Eddie Bruce-Jones (Birkbeck), Annette-Carina van der Zaag (Birkbeck), Taylor Le Melle (pssss.co), Darnell L. Moore and Rabz Lansiquot.
The symposium is supported by Signifyin’ Works, Birkbeck institute of Gender and Sexuality, The Birkbeck Guilt Group, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Birkbeck Department of Psychosocial Studies.
This is the MA Psychosocial Studies annual lecture.
This is a free event but bookings are required. Please book your place from this link.
Contact name:
Psychosocial Studies