In
Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge.
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When Cedric Robinson’s
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition first appeared in 1983, it was far from an instant classic. Aside from a couple of extended reviews that focused on Robinson’s critique of Marxism, most academic mentions were cursory, hardly bothering with the more challenging aspects of his argument. Coming as it did on the heels of Black Power–era debates over whether Marxism was appropriate for Black struggle, movement intellectuals did engage and debate the book. However, its reception among this crowd was complicated by the fact that it didn’t wholly validate the competing claims of either Black Marxists or Black nationalists despite some in both camps who argued that the book supported their views.