Article
Prayin’ for Queer Times: Choir Boy and enactments of transient performance
Cultural Dynamics
(2020)
Abstract
“Prayin’ for Queer Times: Choir Boy and Enactments of Transient Performance” serves as an introduction to this special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. Using a young, queer black man’s coming-of-age story at an African American all–boys prep school as a point of departure, the article elaborates transient performance as a new analytic that can account for the intersections of transnational movement, performance, geography, black and refugee peoples, and fugitivity as previewed in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, Choir Boy. The authors weave together queer theory and black feminist theory to articulate the spatiotemporal dimensions of transient performance. This theorization is followed by a brief synopsis of each contributor’s article. “Prayin’ for Queer Times” closes with a return to Choir Boy, specifically the sonic movements of the protagonist and the ways in which his performance gestures to marginalized peoples’ everyday practices of survival. It is the editors’ and contributors’ hope that this issue will spark conversation and action that helps lead to the fruition of more inhabitable, and thus queer, geographies.
Keywords
- black studies,
- Choir Boy,
- futurity,
- geography,
- performance studies,
- queer theory,
- refugee,
- Tarell Alvin McCraney
Disciplines
Publication Date
2020
DOI
10.1177/0921374020934510
Citation Information
Kimberly C Welch. "Prayin’ for Queer Times: Choir Boy and enactments of transient performance" Cultural Dynamics (2020) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kimberly-welch/5/