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Queer Studies Research Workshop *Work in Progress* talk, “Refusing Erasure: Nugent, Fire!!, and the Legacies of Queer Harlem,” Sam King-Shaw (GGS)
October 8, 2021 @ 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
First-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Sam King-Shaw has been selected as a 2021 Portz Scholar by the National Collegiate Honors Council. Their thesis, “Refusing Erasure: Nugent, Fire!!, and the Legacies of Queer Harlem,” was nominated for this award as the best honors thesis of its year at Washington State University, and has been chosen as one of four papers to be delivered at a plenary of the NCHC Annual Conference this fall.
This talk excavates the work of two queer Black artists, Richard Bruce Nugent and Marlon Riggs, who worked in two very different time periods, the Harlem Renaissance and the cultural backlash of the late 1980s. Through a comparative textual analysis of Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Riggs’s Tongues Untied, King-Shaw explores the fluctuations of Black queer cultural production during the 20th century, positioning Riggs within the sociopolitical and cultural legacy of Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance, in order to illustrate the generative potential of radical queer Black art.
