Homesick Blues: Excavating Crooked Intimacies in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Jook Joints (original) (raw)

2017

Abstract

This article traverses the bittersweet antagonisms of home and disorienting counter-privates inhabited by Black laborers during the decades following U.S. Reconstruction. I chart the inception of modern African American homes and the disorderly stages that queered homeliness. Drawing from snippets of oral history, blues lyrics, archival documents, and photographs I excavate the material and spatial fabric of Black homes and their unruly counterparts - jook houses. This article facilitates a cross-disciplinary engagement with affect theory, queer theory and ontological approaches to materiality, in an attempt to understand how jook atmospheres generated deviant intimacies. In doing so, this article examines how a coalescence of crooked bodies and homesick feelings threatened to throw the order of home into chaos. The assemblage of deviant performers and materials that once resided in these rural spaces craft a focal point for understanding the transformative possibilities of pleasure erupting in queer Black histories.

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