Francesca T Royster
Biographic Data
| ID | 1010055 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francesca T Royster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francesca T |
| FAMILY NAME | Royster |
| SIGNATURE | ROYSTER F T |
| AFFILIATIONS | DePaul University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5905-823X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cruising Utopia with Brittany Howard: Jaime 's Queer Afrofuturism
Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space, which helps us understand the impact of mus…
Stories We Tell After Orlando
Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Francesca T. Royster 503 Francesca T. Royster Stories We Tell After Orlando We are in Laila’s backyard for a Sunday barbecue, a cool and windy Chicago June day that immediately followed one of the very hottest days so far this year. My partner Annie and I have brought our fouryear -old daughter Cece and her best friend Gilda to the barbecue, and they’ve dressed themselves in layers, with leggings and hoodies …
Black Edens, country Eves: Listening, performance, and black queer longing in country music
This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black cou…
Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community
This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of col…
Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project
Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project is one part historic document, one part literary anthology, one part road map, one part aesthetic theory, and one pa
“Queering the Jazz Aesthetic: An Interview with Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni Jones”: “Queering the Jazz Aesthetic”
“Different Love?”: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue: Different Love?
Black Body Returned: A Response to George Lewis’s talk “In Search of Ben Patterson: An Improvised Journey”
Black Body ReturnedA Response to George Lewis’s talk “In Search of Ben Patterson: An Improvised Journey” Francesca T. Royster (bio) As we’ve been thinking about translation so far at this conference, we touched on some powerful issues, including the translation of the artist’s desires as it meets its subject and with that, the work of the critic as product of that alliance of desires. As Brent Hayes Edwards has reminded us: “mutual interest lies …
Comic Terror and Masculine Vulnerability in Slings and Arrows: Season Three
Comic Terror and Masculine Vulnerability in Slings and Arrows:Season Three Francesca T. Royster (bio) Tony Tasset's "Eye" Terror is an overwhelming feeling of panic and uncertainty; terrorism, the deliberate manipulation of that fear by force. In this post 9/11 moment there is an ongoing and ever-shifting transformation of our public sphere into a theatre of terror: from the U.S. direction of that terror in the photos of detainee abuse in Abu-Ghr…
Introductory Notes: Performing Queer Lives
How are life writing and queer theory at odds with what we've come to expect in autobiographical narratives? The essays in this collection intervene in the traditional project of autobiography by taking as their subject the process of queered meaning making. Our focus on "queer" and "performing" brings the following challenges to life writing: fi rst, to expand the social defi nitions of the self or "I" as the readable, recognizable subject; seco…
Fela: Fela Kuti, Bill T. Jones, and the Marketing of Black Masculine Excess on Broadway
Choreographer Bill T. Jones and Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti have both shaped careers that have confounded categorizations, exploring sometimes contradictory spaces of gender, sexuality, race, and national loyalty through performance. This essay considers the recent Broadway show Fela! , a biographical and performative exploration of Fela Kuti and his life, directed and choreographed by Jones, as a means of thinking about the queer intercon…
Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual: A Round Table of the 2009 Callaloo Conference
Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no: Grace Jones and the performance of Strangé in the Post-Soul Moment
In Grace Jones' work and that of the other black artists influenced by her, we see the wedding of disco and punk; art and fashion; male and female, animal and human, and human and machine to create new notions of black sexuality. Jones' use of drag puts her into the larger history of the ways that performers of the African Diaspora use performance in complex ways to lobby a critique of the dehumanization of black people. Yet Jones' use of drag an…
“Working Like a Dog”: African Labor and Racing the Human-Animal Divide in Early Modern England
Jeanne Addison Roberts sees the function of animal imagery in early modern English culture as means to explore what can't be faced directly: "As agents of revelation, animals operate effectively because they operate to expose a duality in humanity, a haunting combination of the recognized and the strange. Because they are both familiar and mysterious, they can often serve as links between the known and the unknown. In literature and in art, anima…
Epilogue: Cleopatra in an Age of Racial Profiling
Since Cleopatra always has appeared at the nexus of changing identity, it was fitting that I went to see the Chicago Field Museum's "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth" exhibit in early October 2001. It was a few weeks after September 11, at a time when the "we" of the United States was under a heavy burden of self-fashioning. Ambiguous threats of violence still loomed on the horizon. 1 figured that, because of these fears of targeted publi…
African Dreams, Egyptian Nightmares: Cleopatra and Becoming England
What happens when we follow Cleopatra's direction in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to "Think on me, / That am with Phoebus's amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time" (1.5.27–29)? In the play, the color or Antony's "crocodile," Cleopatra, is at the heart of the struggle for power and cultural identity staged by the play. According to theater historian Richard Madelaine, on the Jacobean stage at least, Cleopatra was most likely perf…
Introduction: Becoming Cleopatra
The Cleopatra icon has remained powerful over time because she signifies reinvention—the fantasy of being able to slough off one's "cires and mantles" for a new skin. If there is one passage that would best describe the Cleopatra icon, it would be Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra emerging from her barge, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they f…
Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon
Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no: Grace Jones and the performance of Strangé in the Post-Soul Moment
In Grace Jones' work and that of the other black artists influenced by her, we see the wedding of disco and punk; art and fashion; male and female, animal and human, and human and machine to create new notions of black sexuality. Jones' use of drag puts her into the larger history of the ways that performers of the African Diaspora use performance in complex ways to lobby a critique of the dehumanization of black people. Yet Jones' use of drag an…
Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community
This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of col…
Fela: Fela Kuti, Bill T. Jones, and the Marketing of Black Masculine Excess on Broadway
Choreographer Bill T. Jones and Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti have both shaped careers that have confounded categorizations, exploring sometimes contradictory spaces of gender, sexuality, race, and national loyalty through performance. This essay considers the recent Broadway show Fela! , a biographical and performative exploration of Fela Kuti and his life, directed and choreographed by Jones, as a means of thinking about the queer intercon…
Introductory Notes: Performing Queer Lives
How are life writing and queer theory at odds with what we've come to expect in autobiographical narratives? The essays in this collection intervene in the traditional project of autobiography by taking as their subject the process of queered meaning making. Our focus on "queer" and "performing" brings the following challenges to life writing: fi rst, to expand the social defi nitions of the self or "I" as the readable, recognizable subject; seco…
Black Edens, country Eves: Listening, performance, and black queer longing in country music
This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black cou…
Epilogue: Cleopatra in an Age of Racial Profiling
Since Cleopatra always has appeared at the nexus of changing identity, it was fitting that I went to see the Chicago Field Museum's "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth" exhibit in early October 2001. It was a few weeks after September 11, at a time when the "we" of the United States was under a heavy burden of self-fashioning. Ambiguous threats of violence still loomed on the horizon. 1 figured that, because of these fears of targeted publi…
African Dreams, Egyptian Nightmares: Cleopatra and Becoming England
What happens when we follow Cleopatra's direction in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to "Think on me, / That am with Phoebus's amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time" (1.5.27–29)? In the play, the color or Antony's "crocodile," Cleopatra, is at the heart of the struggle for power and cultural identity staged by the play. According to theater historian Richard Madelaine, on the Jacobean stage at least, Cleopatra was most likely perf…
Introduction: Becoming Cleopatra
The Cleopatra icon has remained powerful over time because she signifies reinvention—the fantasy of being able to slough off one's "cires and mantles" for a new skin. If there is one passage that would best describe the Cleopatra icon, it would be Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra emerging from her barge, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they f…
Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon
“Working Like a Dog”: African Labor and Racing the Human-Animal Divide in Early Modern England
Jeanne Addison Roberts sees the function of animal imagery in early modern English culture as means to explore what can't be faced directly: "As agents of revelation, animals operate effectively because they operate to expose a duality in humanity, a haunting combination of the recognized and the strange. Because they are both familiar and mysterious, they can often serve as links between the known and the unknown. In literature and in art, anima…
Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no: Grace Jones and the performance of Strangé in the Post-Soul Moment
In Grace Jones' work and that of the other black artists influenced by her, we see the wedding of disco and punk; art and fashion; male and female, animal and human, and human and machine to create new notions of black sexuality. Jones' use of drag puts her into the larger history of the ways that performers of the African Diaspora use performance in complex ways to lobby a critique of the dehumanization of black people. Yet Jones' use of drag an…
Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual: A Round Table of the 2009 Callaloo Conference
Comic Terror and Masculine Vulnerability in Slings and Arrows: Season Three
Comic Terror and Masculine Vulnerability in Slings and Arrows:Season Three Francesca T. Royster (bio) Tony Tasset's "Eye" Terror is an overwhelming feeling of panic and uncertainty; terrorism, the deliberate manipulation of that fear by force. In this post 9/11 moment there is an ongoing and ever-shifting transformation of our public sphere into a theatre of terror: from the U.S. direction of that terror in the photos of detainee abuse in Abu-Ghr…
Introductory Notes: Performing Queer Lives
How are life writing and queer theory at odds with what we've come to expect in autobiographical narratives? The essays in this collection intervene in the traditional project of autobiography by taking as their subject the process of queered meaning making. Our focus on "queer" and "performing" brings the following challenges to life writing: fi rst, to expand the social defi nitions of the self or "I" as the readable, recognizable subject; seco…
Fela: Fela Kuti, Bill T. Jones, and the Marketing of Black Masculine Excess on Broadway
Choreographer Bill T. Jones and Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti have both shaped careers that have confounded categorizations, exploring sometimes contradictory spaces of gender, sexuality, race, and national loyalty through performance. This essay considers the recent Broadway show Fela! , a biographical and performative exploration of Fela Kuti and his life, directed and choreographed by Jones, as a means of thinking about the queer intercon…
Black Body Returned: A Response to George Lewis’s talk “In Search of Ben Patterson: An Improvised Journey”
Black Body ReturnedA Response to George Lewis’s talk “In Search of Ben Patterson: An Improvised Journey” Francesca T. Royster (bio) As we’ve been thinking about translation so far at this conference, we touched on some powerful issues, including the translation of the artist’s desires as it meets its subject and with that, the work of the critic as product of that alliance of desires. As Brent Hayes Edwards has reminded us: “mutual interest lies …
“Queering the Jazz Aesthetic: An Interview with Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni Jones”: “Queering the Jazz Aesthetic”
“Different Love?”: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue: Different Love?
Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project
Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project is one part historic document, one part literary anthology, one part road map, one part aesthetic theory, and one pa
Black Edens, country Eves: Listening, performance, and black queer longing in country music
This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black cou…
Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community
This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of col…
Stories We Tell After Orlando
Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Francesca T. Royster 503 Francesca T. Royster Stories We Tell After Orlando We are in Laila’s backyard for a Sunday barbecue, a cool and windy Chicago June day that immediately followed one of the very hottest days so far this year. My partner Annie and I have brought our fouryear -old daughter Cece and her best friend Gilda to the barbecue, and they’ve dressed themselves in layers, with leggings and hoodies …
Cruising Utopia with Brittany Howard: Jaime 's Queer Afrofuturism
Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space, which helps us understand the impact of mus…
Art (16 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · History (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Music History and Culture (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)