The Punk Show: Queering heritage in the Black diaspora

Abstract

This article presents ethnography of Black cultural politics in post-flood New Orleans during the summer and fall of 2009. I engage in three interrelated subjects: (1) life histories and oral narratives in which I trace a history of Black queer performances locally referred to as “Punk Shows”; (2) my observations of a community play in which heritage, Black queer subjectivity, and the struggle over communal memory intersect; and (3) a broader discussion of the ways power is constituted by the shaping of history and communal memory to narrate race and sexuality. I argue that some ways of life are constructed as timeless, recuperable, and productive to the nation rather than ephemeral and contradictory. In arguing for a theory of Black queer generation, I deploy performance studies to valorize the “ephemeral” history of their cultural labor.