Tavia Nyong’o
Biographic Data
| ID | 128511 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tavia Nyong’o |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tavia |
| FAMILY NAME | Nyong’o |
| SIGNATURE | NYONG’O T |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Dossier
The 12 short provocations “From the Floor” explore the analog intimacies, memories, textures, practices, vibrancies, and contingencies of the dancefloor
Listening for Utopia
This article explores the concept of utopia through the lens of music, drawing on Ernst Bloch’s philosophical framework and extending it through Black and queer utopian thought. The author examines how Bloch’s metaphor of “forests dreaming” connects to Alice Coltrane’s musical explorations of consciousness, establishing music as a vehicle for utopian imagination. By engaging with the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Jayna Brown, the essay argues fo…
Unburdening Liveness
How has presence transformed under recent pandemic conditions and ongoing digital saturation? José Esteban Muñoz’s now classic critique of liveness illuminates the works of several contemporary Black performance artists whose work intervenes against the corporeal burdens of our moment
Presence, 2019–2022
Our understanding of “presence” has made an epochal shift in the past three years. The field of performance studies—never settled, always in flux—is shifting as well on this topic, as what we study expands digitally, contracts physically, embraces new paradigms, and unlooses others. While it is impossible to fix an exact time when attitudes about something as ineffable yet entirely real as presence changed permanently, this issue touches down on …
"Opacity, Narration, and "The Fathomless Word
Opacity, Narration, and ''The Fathomless Word''If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure?-Judith Butler, Giving an Account of OneselfWe remember that Plato, who understood the power of Myth, had hoped to banish the poets, those who force obscurity, far from the Republic.He distrusted the fathomless word
Interregnum
This eclectic set of essays includes work about Zoom, the murder by police of Rayshard Brooks, blackness and public space, and black joy and uchromatism
Their Mind Is Sex, Y’know?”
“Their Mind Is Sex, Y’know?”: Little Richard Shades the Authenticity Debate Tavia Nyong’o (bio) For many who came of age during the 1980s, our introduction to the not-so-subtle arts of shade came when the Black queer rock legend Little Richard effectively snatched the wig off the American music industry during the 1988 Grammys telecast. Invited onstage to co-present the award for Best New Artist, alongside David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Ri…
Upheavals in Black Thought
Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called "the position of the unthought." This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to "include" blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the…
“Rip It Up”
The Sense of Brown
Afterword
The authors formulate “queer reconstellations” as a way to push the field of queer studies beyond its critical settlement in programmatic thinking that often organizes the field in predictable pathways. They also challenge those deviations that do not fundamentally transform the field’s subjects and objects. Using “left of queer” as at once a provocation, a nodal point, and a pathway into the arts of being ungovernable, this afterword proposes a …
The Crypt of Blackness
Algorithms and Performance
December 01 2019 Algorithms and Performance: An Introduction Elise Morrison, Elise Morrison Elise Morrison, Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Yale University, is the author of Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2016). She is Associate Editor for the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media. [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: This S…
Afro-Fabulations
Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre ResearchArgues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insur…
Debt to Society
June 01 2018 Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism; Knowledge Ltd: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism. By MirandaJoseph. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; 240 pp. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.Knowledge Ltd: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative. By RandyMartin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015; 276 pp. $89.50 cloth, $29.95 paper, e-book available…
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
Queering Archives
Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion" provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the field's future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and …
Little Monsters
This essay uses the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild to investigate the lingering investments in race and sovereignty that one encounters in fables of queer rewilding. Exploring the genealogy of the mythical aurochs as it is reanimated in both dramatic and eugenic contexts, the essay queries the burden of fabulation that the film places on its youthful protagonist. This burden restages the scene of engulfment through which racialized bodies …
Unburdening Representation
Afro-philo-sonic Fictions
This essay reviews two recent publications in the area of black music and sound studies—Julian Henriques's Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011) and Alexander G. Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005)—taking particular note of the role of critical theory, as well as of gender and sexuality, in the contemporary literature
In Finitude
Through an engagement with José Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer-of-color counterpublicity, this essay proposes that we participate in his legacy through acts of methexis—or “group sharing”—rather than mimesis. Muñoz and Pedro Zamora are two figures from the Miami-based Cuban exile community who subvert the clichéd image of that community as a conservative force in US politics and culture. Rereading Muñoz’s writings on Zamora of The Real World ,…
Being with José
This coauthored introduction reflects on some of the impacts of José Esteban Muñoz’s life and work-from his scholarship through his friendship and mentoring to his collaborations in intellectual and social life. The coauthors emphasize Muñoz’s commitment to both the production of minoritarian knowledge and the thought of plural singularity, or what this issue as a whole indexes with the name “Being With
“Different Love?”: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue
Situating precarity between the body and the commons
Notes1. Precarity in English follows cognate usages in French (précarité), Spanish (precariedad) and so on.2. Schram (Citation2013).3. Butler (Citation2003; Citation2009).4. Harney and Moten (Citation2013).5. Horning (Citation2012).6. Ridout and Schneider (Citation2012).7. Ridout and Schneider (2012, 6); Jackson (Citation2012); Martin (Citation2012).8. On "affective mapping," see Flatley (Citation2008). The interventions of Angela Mitropoulos (Ci…
Punk and Its Afterlives
Punk and Its Afterlives: Introduction” presents the special issue and stages an intervention in the study of punk. Setting aside codified origin myths around punk, alternative histories and futures emerge to offer an expanded continuum of music, politics, and affect. Race and nation, gender and sexuality, all begin to resonate in ways that writing on punk has had difficulty accounting for. The articles in this special issue range from the 1970s t…
Queering Archives
Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion" provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the field's future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and …
Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis
Research Article| January 01 2012 Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion Christina Crosby; Christina Crosby Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lisa Duggan; Lisa Duggan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roderick Ferguson; Roderick Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Kevin Floyd; Kevin Floyd Search for other works by this author on: This Site G…
Little Monsters
This essay uses the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild to investigate the lingering investments in race and sovereignty that one encounters in fables of queer rewilding. Exploring the genealogy of the mythical aurochs as it is reanimated in both dramatic and eugenic contexts, the essay queries the burden of fabulation that the film places on its youthful protagonist. This burden restages the scene of engulfment through which racialized bodies …
Queer Africa and the Fantasy of Virtual Participation
Law Could Lead to Genocide As I write this, I get a tweet. BradNYC wants me to know that this anti-gay law could easily lead to genocide.1 1 click the provided link, which takes me to the website for CNN and the headline Ugandan Antigay Measure Will Be Law Soon, Lawmaker Says (McKenzie 2010). Alarming to be sure, as is the video clip one can play immediately below, featuring the article's author, CNN's Nairobi-based correspondent David McKenzie, …
The unforgivable transgression of being Caster Semenya
After winning the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in August, sprinter Caster Semenya returned to a hero's welcome in her native South Africa, where the public denounced the
Punk'd Theory
Research Article| December 01 2005 Punk'd Theory Tavia Nyong'o Tavia Nyong'o Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2005) 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-19 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Tavia Nyong'o; Punk'd Theory. Social Text 1 December 2005; 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 19–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-19 Download c…
Unburdening Representation
"Opacity, Narration, and "The Fathomless Word
Opacity, Narration, and ''The Fathomless Word''If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure?-Judith Butler, Giving an Account of OneselfWe remember that Plato, who understood the power of Myth, had hoped to banish the poets, those who force obscurity, far from the Republic.He distrusted the fathomless word
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
Situating precarity between the body and the commons
Notes1. Precarity in English follows cognate usages in French (précarité), Spanish (precariedad) and so on.2. Schram (Citation2013).3. Butler (Citation2003; Citation2009).4. Harney and Moten (Citation2013).5. Horning (Citation2012).6. Ridout and Schneider (Citation2012).7. Ridout and Schneider (2012, 6); Jackson (Citation2012); Martin (Citation2012).8. On "affective mapping," see Flatley (Citation2008). The interventions of Angela Mitropoulos (Ci…
Recall and response
Upheavals in Black Thought
Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called "the position of the unthought." This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to "include" blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the…
Afro-philo-sonic Fictions
This essay reviews two recent publications in the area of black music and sound studies—Julian Henriques's Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011) and Alexander G. Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005)—taking particular note of the role of critical theory, as well as of gender and sexuality, in the contemporary literature
Being with José
This coauthored introduction reflects on some of the impacts of José Esteban Muñoz’s life and work-from his scholarship through his friendship and mentoring to his collaborations in intellectual and social life. The coauthors emphasize Muñoz’s commitment to both the production of minoritarian knowledge and the thought of plural singularity, or what this issue as a whole indexes with the name “Being With
Unfinished situations
Revisiting the poetry, fiction, and social criticism of the author, dramatist, activist and therapist Paul Goodman, this essay suggests that his work–and in particular the concept of the “unfinished situation”–has something to contribute to queer theoretical interests in extended adolescence, amateurish performances, and punk feelings
Social Text
Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name Social Text, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate, the chapter titled “The Social Text” in the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (1961) is an intriguing intertext for the journal, especially given the importance of the category of the “ever…
Black Theatre's Closet Drama
Where do the early blackface plays collected in W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow belong in the genealogy of black performance?10 Nowhere, Shauneille Perry suggests.11 Contrasting blackface minstrelsy with black radicalism, Perry notes reprovingly, "Had there been a multitude of Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, Toussaint L'Ouvertures and Mary Princes in 19th-century America, there would have been no Jim Crow, then or now." Perry invokes these heroic name…
Racial Kitsch and Black Performance
If kitsch is failed seriousness, as the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg has proposed, then the racist kitsch that we still occasionally encounter in flea markets, on trips abroad, and in galleries and museums of contemporary art might be defined as failed humor (see Figures 1 and 2). Kitsch, according to Greenberg, attempts to say something profound, but can utter only clichés. Its abject failure is an embarrassment. The sub-genre of racis…
Passing as politics
Black Theatre's Closet Drama
Where do the early blackface plays collected in W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow belong in the genealogy of black performance?10 Nowhere, Shauneille Perry suggests.11 Contrasting blackface minstrelsy with black radicalism, Perry notes reprovingly, "Had there been a multitude of Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, Toussaint L'Ouvertures and Mary Princes in 19th-century America, there would have been no Jim Crow, then or now." Perry invokes these heroic name…
Queer TVA Comment
Other| January 01 2005 QUEER TVA Comment Tavia Nyong'o Tavia Nyong'o Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (1): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-1-103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tavia Nyong'o; QUEER TVA Comment. GLQ 1 January 2005; 11 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-1-103 Download citation file: Zotero Refer…
Punk'd Theory
Research Article| December 01 2005 Punk'd Theory Tavia Nyong'o Tavia Nyong'o Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2005) 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-19 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Tavia Nyong'o; Punk'd Theory. Social Text 1 December 2005; 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 19–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-19 Download c…
Rip It Up
March 01 2006 Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ‘n’ Roll; Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race; Afropunk: The “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” Experience Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ‘n’ Roll. HorseKandia Crazy. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. MahonMaureen. Afropunk: The “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” Experience. Directed bySpoonerJames, 2003; produced byMackinsAyanna …
Recall and response
The Low-End Theory
Book Review| June 01 2007 THE LOW-END THEORY Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” Kathryn Bond Stockton Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xi + 271 pp. Tavia Nyong'o Tavia Nyong'o Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2007) 13 (2-3): 403–405. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006-040 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Tavia Nyon…
Unfinished situations
Revisiting the poetry, fiction, and social criticism of the author, dramatist, activist and therapist Paul Goodman, this essay suggests that his work–and in particular the concept of the “unfinished situation”–has something to contribute to queer theoretical interests in extended adolescence, amateurish performances, and punk feelings
Performance
Can “performance” ever be exactly defined? Or is the constitutive tension between what performances are and what performatives do simply part of what makes the field of performance studies politically pertinent
Social Text
Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name Social Text, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate, the chapter titled “The Social Text” in the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (1961) is an intriguing intertext for the journal, especially given the importance of the category of the “ever…
Art
Was the photograph Shepard Fairey used as a basis for his “Hope” image of Barack Obama a social text? The Associated Press thought not when it threatened to sue Fairey for using a photograph it owned as the basis for his poster. What issues of aesthetics and appropriation are raised when remixers claim, in the name of an electronic commons, access to the anonymously produced creativity of the Internet
Brown Punk
How might a song carry the past without being burdened by history? In his performances for the camera, for audio recordings, and for live audiences, the artist Kalup Linzy explores the urgency of this question for contemporary black and queer subjects. Linzy's 2009 video song cycle, SweetBerry Sonnet, is a musical archive of radical passivity—one that manifests the anticipatory stance taken towards the world by the multiple personae Linzy invents…
Sex and Sociability
Sex and Sociability Tavia Nyong'o (bio) Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. By Jayna Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 339 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. By Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 379 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. By Shane Vogel. Chic…
The unforgivable transgression of being Caster Semenya
After winning the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in August, sprinter Caster Semenya returned to a hero's welcome in her native South Africa, where the public denounced the
Have You Seen His Childhood? Song, Screen, and the Queer Culture of the Child in Michael Jackson's Music
Darker than Blue
The Scene of Occupation
A year on, the Occupy movement is in shambles, according to skeptics. But was it ever anything but a shambles? A search for Occupy zombies in London and New York unearths the distinctive forms of dread and refuge on the scene of occupation. Can the zombies tell us how to disinter ourselves from the living graves of capitalism
Queer Africa and the Fantasy of Virtual Participation
Law Could Lead to Genocide As I write this, I get a tweet. BradNYC wants me to know that this anti-gay law could easily lead to genocide.1 1 click the provided link, which takes me to the website for CNN and the headline Ugandan Antigay Measure Will Be Law Soon, Lawmaker Says (McKenzie 2010). Alarming to be sure, as is the video clip one can play immediately below, featuring the article's author, CNN's Nairobi-based correspondent David McKenzie, …
Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis
Research Article| January 01 2012 Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion Christina Crosby; Christina Crosby Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lisa Duggan; Lisa Duggan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roderick Ferguson; Roderick Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Kevin Floyd; Kevin Floyd Search for other works by this author on: This Site G…
“Different Love?”: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue
Situating precarity between the body and the commons
Notes1. Precarity in English follows cognate usages in French (précarité), Spanish (precariedad) and so on.2. Schram (Citation2013).3. Butler (Citation2003; Citation2009).4. Harney and Moten (Citation2013).5. Horning (Citation2012).6. Ridout and Schneider (Citation2012).7. Ridout and Schneider (2012, 6); Jackson (Citation2012); Martin (Citation2012).8. On "affective mapping," see Flatley (Citation2008). The interventions of Angela Mitropoulos (Ci…
Punk and Its Afterlives
Punk and Its Afterlives: Introduction” presents the special issue and stages an intervention in the study of punk. Setting aside codified origin myths around punk, alternative histories and futures emerge to offer an expanded continuum of music, politics, and affect. Race and nation, gender and sexuality, all begin to resonate in ways that writing on punk has had difficulty accounting for. The articles in this special issue range from the 1970s t…
Unburdening Representation
Afro-philo-sonic Fictions
This essay reviews two recent publications in the area of black music and sound studies—Julian Henriques's Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011) and Alexander G. Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005)—taking particular note of the role of critical theory, as well as of gender and sexuality, in the contemporary literature
Art (31 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Political science (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Art history (15 works) · History (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Queer (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works)