A01=David A. Gerstner
African American
African American studies
art
author
Author_David A. Gerstner
black
Category=AB
Category=ABA
Category=ATF
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSJ
Category=JBSL
cinema
cinematic
dance
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
expression
film
filmmaker
gay
gender
gender studies
homosexuality
identity
James Baldwin
literary
literature
Marlon Riggs
novels
Nugent
outlet
painter
paiting
poetry
prose
queer
race
race relations
Richard Bruce Nugent
seduction
sexuality
studies
white
writer
Product details
- ISBN 9780252035906
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2011
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Queer Pollen discusses three notable black queer twentieth century artists--painter and writer Richard Bruce Nugent, author James Baldwin, and filmmaker Marlon Riggs--and the unique ways they turned to various media to work through their experiences living as queer black men. David A. Gerstner elucidates the complexities in expressing queer black desire through traditional art forms such as painting, poetry, and literary prose, or in the industrial medium of cinema. This challenge is made particularly sharp when the terms "black" and "homosexuality" come freighted with white ideological conceptualizations. Gerstner adroitly demonstrates how Nugent, Baldwin, and Riggs interrogated the seductive power and saturation of white queer cultures, grasping the deceit of an entrenched cultural logic that defined their identity and their desire in terms of whiteness. Their work confounds the notion of foundational origins that prescribe the limits of homosexual and racial desire, perversely refusing the cordoned-off classifications assigned to the "homosexual" and the "raced" body. Queer Pollen articulates a cinematic aesthetic that unfolds through painting, poetry, dance, novels, film, and video that marks the queer black body in relation to matters of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and death.
David A. Gerstner is a professor of cinema studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. His other books include Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema.
