Introduction Archive, Region, Affect, Aesthetics The image stopped me in my tracks. “I know you,” I thought as I gazed at the black- and- white photograph from the early 1950s. Identified in the caption simply as “Abed, a tailor,” the subject in the photograph looks directly into the camera as he leans on his elbows with his hands folded gracefully under his chin. There was something in Abed’s gaze—forthright, uncompromising, fierce—and the precise and delicate gesture of his hands framing his face, that evoked the femme aesthetic of the young queers of color I remember seeing on the Hudson River piers during my young adulthood in New York City in the early 1990s. With his finely chiseled face, perfectly arched eyebrows, and elaborately coiffed hair, Abed was to my contemporary gaze immediately recognizable as a gender- queer figure. I first encountered this image while leafing through the 2004 coedited book Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, by the B eirut- based Lebanese art- ist Akram Zaatari. El Madani is a studio photographer from Saida (Sidon), Zaatari’s coastal hometown in southern Lebanon, and the book was created to coincide with the first exhibition of El Madani’s work in the United King- dom, cocurated by Zaatari at the Photographer’s Gallery in London in 2004. El Madani opened his Studio Shehrazade in Saida in 1953, and over more than fifty years created hundreds of thousands of portraits of Saida’s residents: Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 Figure Intro.1 “Abed, a tailor. Madani’s parents’ home, the studio, 1948–53,” from Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, courtesy of Akram Zaatari and Arab Image Foundation. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 brides and grooms, wrestlers and babies, resistance fighters and refugees. The portraits in Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices date from the early 1950s to the mid- 1970s, and tell of everyday life and the self- representational prac- tices in the mid- twentieth- century city. Zaatari’s fascination with El Madani’s work stems from his general interest in the making of modernity in Lebanon, and specifically in the role of image- making practices such as studio photogra- phy. But of special interest to Zaatari is El Madani as a chronicler of everyday life in south Lebanon per se, a region rendered “other” in relation to the larger Lebanese nation by successive waves of war and Israeli occupation between 1978 and 2000.1 In Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, Zaatari in his dual role as artist and curator reproduces and organizes specific images from El Madani’s vast collection that he finds especially significant and moving. Of the thousands of negatives in El Madani’s collection, a striking number of the images reprinted by Zaatari suggest some version of gender nonconformity or same- sex eroti- cism. This includes the photograph of “Abed, a tailor” that I found so arrest- ing, and whom El Madani m atter- of- factly notes was “effeminate.”2 Despite my initial, visceral sense of familiarity upon encountering this image in El Madani’s reconstituted archive, the longer I gazed at it the further it receded. Given that a photograph can never act as a transparent or unmediated visual record of the past, the image of “Abed, a tailor” cannot tell me who Abed “really” was, who or how he desired, or what his gender embodiment defin- itively meant to him or those around him. Rather, as my own initial shock of (mis)recognition suggests, Zaatari’s re- presentation of El Madani’s images activates transtemporal relays of affective relationality between the subjects in the photographs, Zaatari, and other contemporary viewers (such as myself) that produce new meanings for these images as they circulate in the present. I discuss Zaatari’s work at length in chapter 4, but I open with this im- age, and my initial response to it, because it exemplifies the interrelation of archive, region, affect, and aesthetics that is my central concern in Unruly Visions.3 Zaatari’s reading of El Madani’s archive, and the reordering and re- framing of the images he finds there, stand as a model for the queer curato- rial practice I offer here; indeed there are multiple layers of queer curation at play in this book. Zaatari curates El Madani’s images to do a specific kind of work: in Zaatari’s hands, El Madani’s images “perform new histories,” as he himself puts it.4 He uses them to tell an alternative history of the Lebanese nation in a minor key, so to speak, through foregrounding the queer desires and embodiments that suffused everyday life in mid- twentieth- century Saida. Introduction : 3 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 In turn, I situate Zaatari’s images alongside the work of other artists to do a different kind of work, and in this sense Unruly Visions stands as my own act of queer curation. As scholars/curators Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton point out, the root meaning of the word “curate” is “caring for”: this con- nection between “curation” and “caring for,” they contend, demands that we think of curation “not only as selection, design, and interpretation, but as care- taking—as a kind of intimate, intersubjective, interrelational obligation,” an obligation to “deal with the past” in particular.5 The notion of curation not only as “repositioning” and “re- arrangement,”6 but also as a mode of “inter- subjective, interrelational obligation” to engaging the past, resonates deeply with my own sense of Unruly Visions as a queer curatorial project.7 I want to suggest that the “caring for” the past that is at the root of curation can take the form of carefully attending to aesthetic practices through writing: the critical analysis of art objects/aesthetic practices by placing them in relation to one another can function as a mode of queer curation. To “care for” is also to “care about”; thus the project of queer curation, as I understand it, is the obligation to impart that “caring about” to others. Queer scholars have pow- erfully demonstrated the ways in which queer art, scholarship, and activism have always evinced a sense of obligation to document, analyze, archive, and value the small, the inconsequential, and the ephemeral, so much of which make up the messy beauty and drama of queer life- worlds.8 My own project of queer curation in these pages is similarly engaged with valuing that which has been deemed without value, but, even more importantly, it deliberately stages “collisions and encounters” between aesthetic practices that may seem discontinuous or unrelated.9 My queer curatorial practice entails an obliga- tion to “care for” and “care about” the connections between these texts and, crucially, to make apparent why these connections matter and what they tell us about our imbricated pasts and futures. As such, Unruly Visions is an act of queer curation that seeks to reveal not coevalness or sameness but rather the co- implication and radical relationality of seemingly disparate racial forma- tions, geographies, temporalities, and colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement and dwelling. My process of selection is driven both by my personal friendship and po- litical networks, as well as by happenstance: some of the artists I write about are known to me through the queer and/or progressive South Asian activist circles we share, while others are established figures who circulate widely in global art markets, and whose work I came across in galleries, exhibitions, museums, and film festivals. My own access to these works speaks to the un- 4 : Introduction Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 even circuits of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception through which they travel. I seek to call attention to the relatively obscure work and defamiliarize the more established work by placing them in relation to one another, in juxtapositions that may seem surprising given their apparently dissimilar formal and thematic concerns. My goal is to arrange and reposition these works so as to identify a shared queer visual aesthetic that mobilizes new ways of seeing both regions and archives, and that puts into play, through an affective register, an intimate relation between the two. As I hope will become evident in the pages that follow, queer visual aes- thetic practices function simultaneously as archival practices that suggest al- ternative understandings of time, space, and relationality that are obscured within dominant history. But, as Zaatari’s reanimation of El Madani’s por- traits makes clear, queer visual aesthetic practices also transform regional ar- chives into queer archives: they bring into the field of vision the memory of quotidian forms of queerness and gender nonconformity that mark the space of the region, as defined both supranationally and subnationally. Such prac- tices thereby conjure forth what I term “a queer regional imaginary,” which I discuss in chapter 1, that stands in contradistinction to a dominant national imaginary that effaces nonconforming bodies, desires, and affiliations. My turn to the region in Unruly Visions as a fruitful concept for both queer and diaspora studies stems from my dissatisfaction with standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation as the primary point of refer- ence, as well as with standard formulations of queerness that fail to grasp the texture of regionally inflected gender and sexual formations.10 In the aesthetic practices that I consider in this book, the evocation of a queer regional imag- inary suggests the possibility of tracing lines of connection and commonal- ity, a kind of South- South relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact bypass the nation.11 Thus, to foreground the category of the region in queer diaspora studies, as I do here, is to produce a new mapping of space and sexuality; this alternative cartography rejects dominant cartogra- phies that either privilege the nation- state or cast into shadow all those spaces, and gender and sexual formations, deemed without value within the map of global capital. While much of the work under discussion in Unruly Visions explores the contours of a queer regional imaginary that mobilizes the concept of the region in its subnational sense, other work in these pages simultaneously explores supranational framings of the region. For instance, Zaatari’s exper- imental documentary This Day (2003) referenced in chapter 4 calls into ques- Introduction : 5 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 tion the production of the “Middle East” as a knowable and mappable entity. Similarly, Delhi- based artist Sheba Chhachhi’s installation Winged Pilgrims (2007), which I analyze in chapter 1, disrupts area studies framings of “Asia” as a region by mapping older histories of encounter and exchange that predate European colonialism and entirely provincialize the global North.12 As such, much of the work I consider in Unruly Visions represents a queer incursion into area studies, where a queer regional imaginary in its supranational sense instantiates alternative cartographies and spatial logics that allow for other histories of global affiliation and affinity to emerge.13 In this sense, my book is aligned with the rich body of scholarship that maps lines of interregional and transnational influence and confluence between and among colonized peoples that transcend a colonial cartographic imagination.14 The queer vi- sual aesthetic practices that are the focus of Unruly Visions both enable and deploy a queer cartographic imagination, which brings into the field of vision precisely those bodies, desires, and modes of affiliation that are elided within dominant colonial—or, indeed, postcolonial nationalist—cartographies. I understand these queer visual aesthetic practices, through which a queer regional imaginary takes shape, more precisely, as “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora.” These practices negotiate diasporic movement in multiple geographic locations, and suggest other ways of being in and moving through these spaces that deviate from the straight lines of h etero- and homonorma- tive scripts that typically determine one’s life trajectory.15 My conceptualiza- tion of “queer diaspora,” which is the formation out of which these aesthetic practices emerge, draws on my previous work in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. There, I theorize queer diaspora as both a spatial and a temporal category: spatial in that it challenges the het- eronormative and patrilineal underpinnings of conventional articulations of diaspora and nation, and temporal in that it reorients the traditionally back- ward glance of conventional articulations of diaspora, often predicated on a desire for a return to lost origins.16 One of my central arguments in Impossible Desires was that queer diaspora provides us with an alternative model of vi- suality, in that it allows us to see those forms of sexual subjectivity, desire, and relationality rendered invisible and unintelligible within conventional mappings of diaspora and nation, as well as within dominant Euro- American articulations of queerness.17 Unruly Visions elaborates upon this alternative model of visuality, which a queer and feminist reformulation of diaspora brings into being, by turning our attention to “minor” sites and locations of queer possibility (such as the 6 : Introduction Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 region). My focus is specifically on aesthetic practices that engage the visual register, and that constitute, and are constituted by, the historical and epi- stemic formation of queer diaspora. While the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora may take any number of forms—literature, performance, music— in this book I specifically emphasize visuality because of its centrality to the workings of colonial modernity and its afterlives.18 Imperial, settler colonial, and racial regimes of power work through spatial practices that order bodies and landscapes in precise ways; these regimes of power also instantiate regimes of vision that determine what we see, how we see, and how we are seen.19 The legitimacy and authority to rule and regulate particular populations has been inextricably linked to the concomitant power to visually survey these popu- lations and the landscapes they inhabit. The targets of this surveilling gaze are consigned simultaneously to both hypervisibility and invisibility.20 An abiding legacy of colonial modernity is its institution of a way of seeing, and hence knowing, that obscures the interrelation of imperial, racial, and settler colonial projects as they produce racial, gendered, and sexual subjectivities. Thus, as part of a first generation of scholars working on queer dias- pora,21 Unruly Visions is my attempt to foreground new directions in the field. Tracing the interrelation between region, archive, and affect through the aesthetic allows queer diaspora studies to engage with bodies of knowl- edge that have only tangentially entered its purview, and to bridge divides between disciplinary and area studies. A careful tending to (and attention to) the aesthetic—and to queer visual aesthetic practices in particular—enables and demands that connections be made between fields of thought, geo- graphic areas, and temporalities that would otherwise not be grasped readily through standard disciplinary approaches. Unruly Visions argues that it is in the realm of the aesthetic that we can excavate these submerged, comingled histories and become attuned to their continuing resonance in the present as they echo across both bodies and landscapes. Through a sustained engage- ment with queer visual aesthetic practices, we can identify alternative ways of seeing and knowing capable of challenging the scopic and sensorial regimes of colonial modernity in their current forms. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora, in other words, disrupt the normative ways of seeing and knowing that have been so central to the production, containment, and disciplining of sexual, racial, and gendered bodies; they do so, crucially, through a partic- ular deployment of queer desire and identification that renders apparent the promiscuous intimacies of our past histories as they continue to structure our everyday present, and determine our futures. Introduction : 7 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 These aesthetic practices enact an excavation of the past through a queer optic, which allows us to apprehend bodies, desires, and affiliations rendered lost or unthinkable within normative history. This queer excavation of the past does not seek to identify or mourn lost origins; nor do queer visual aes- thetic practices necessarily aim at visibility or coherence. Instead, the queer optic instantiated by these practices brings into focus and into the realm of the present the energy of those nonnormative desires, practices, bodies, and affiliations concealed within dominant historical narratives. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora evoke history without a capital H, one that is in- grained in small acts and everyday gestures that play out not on the stage of the nation but in the space of the region. These minor histories can be carefully extracted from informal archives made up of discarded or devalued objects, and in haptic journeys through dust, dirt, and detritus. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora conjure these minor histories into being and make them apparent. Their value lies in their ability to demand that we look be- yond the main event and instead become attuned to submerged and forgot- ten modes of longing, desire, affiliation, and embodiment that may in fact allow us to envision an alternative present and future. As such, these aesthetic practices enact a queer mode of critique that demands a retraining of our vi- sion and a reattunement of our senses, and in so doing point to the limits of the entire apparatus of vision that is the inheritance of colonial modernity. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora are clearly the product of the “intimacies of four continents,” as Lisa Lowe phrases it, in the sense that they emerge out of, and respond to, the legacies of the colonial labor relations that tie Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas to each other; such legacies include the dispossession of indigenous peoples, postcolonial nationalisms, and the diasporas of racialized, migrant labor.22 I argue that these aesthetic practices transform “the scales and timetables of intimacy”23 that were enjoined under colonial or imperial regimes, and that are often resuscitated in contemporary nationalist, postcolonial, or diasporic contexts. For instance, as I discuss in the chapters that follow, the reconstituted family photographs of artists Chitra Ganesh and Allan deSouza, or Tracey Moffatt’s collages and photographs of the sites of her childhood, lay bare the ways in which “home” spaces— whether the South Asian immigrant household or the Australian Aboriginal “settlement”—function as dense zones of sexual/gender/racial regulation under contemporary iterations of empire and colonialism. I understand “in- timacy,” then, to reference the micropolitical spaces of the body, the family, and the domestic as key spaces where power under successive colonial and 8 : Introduction Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 nationalist regimes is consolidated, as well as the spaces where the colonial (or postcolonial) “order of things” may be disrupted and fractured.24 But I also use the term “intimacy” more broadly, to reference the forms of affiliation and affinity, encounter and crossing, not only between bodies but also between histories, spaces, and temporalities. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora, in other words, both make apparent and instantiate the intimacy of fields of thought, historical formations, geographic areas, and temporal frames con- ventionally viewed as discrete and distinct.25 Queer desire, identification, and affiliation are central to apprehending this indiscreteness of multiple histories, spaces, and temporalities. If these aes- thetic practices bring to the fore those shadow histories, subjectivities, and de- sires that are occluded in dominant history, queerness is the conduit through which to access the shadow spaces of the past and bring them into the frame of the present. It is through the backward glances of Akram Zaatari’s queer curation of El Madani’s portraits (chapter 4), or David Kalal’s queering of the late n ineteenth- century oil paintings of the South Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma (chapter 1), or the queer genealogies traced by Chitra Ganesh (chapter 2) and Allan deSouza (chapter 4) via their family photographs, or through Tracey Moffatt’s reframing of the scenes and sites of her childhood (chapter 3), that we can glean the queer modes of affiliation, desire, and em- bodiment that suggest alternative possibilities of organizing social relations in the present.26 The queerness of the archive in these works rests not only in the fact that it acts as a record of queer desires, embodiments, and affiliations that connect different temporal moments, but that it revalues that which is seen as without value: the regional, the personal, the affective, the everyday. From Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani’s creation of a “warm database” that collects information on post- 9/11 South Asian and Arab Muslim male detain- ees that has meaning to the detainees themselves rather than to the U.S. sur- veillance state, to Allan deSouza’s use of the dead matter of his own body in his queer reframing of postcolonial Kenyan nationalism, to Sheba Chhachhi’s repurposing of cheap C hinese- made “plasma tv toys” to tell the history of precolonial Asian cosmopolitanisms, the artists I discuss in Unruly Visions amass and curate queer archives out of precisely those objects that are deemed insignificant, marginal, minor, tangential.27 In so doing, they reveal, interro- gate, and transform the ways in which hierarchies of value determine archival production in the first place. The rubric offered by “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora” allows me to group together seemingly unrelated objects of analysis not typically placed Introduction : 9 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019 in conversation. These works are heterogeneous in form as well as in the var- iegated histories and geographic locations they reference, and out of which they emerge. As I noted earlier, some are by well- established artists, and have garnered significant critical attention, while others are relatively “minor” texts, in that they have limited circulation and fall outside of traditional art- historical frames; still others are considered “minor” or anomalous works in a recognized artist’s oeuvre. The rubric of “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora” illuminates the unexpected convergences between these wide- ranging texts through several key interrelated concepts: the region, as both subnational and supranational space, and the production of alternative car- tographies; the personal and the autobiographical, and the impossibility of originary narratives of individual and collective selves; queer counterarchives and the reframing of history; the role of the ordinary and the everyday, the affective and the sensorial, in producing these alternative archives and car- tographies; the interrogation of the visual field and the limits of a politics of visibility and representation; queerness as an optic and reading practice that brings alternative modes of affiliation and relationality into focus. As this brief sketch of concepts central to Unruly Visions makes clear, I am very much in conversation with the important queer scholarship that has emerged in the past decade or so to powerfully rethink questions of time, space, affect, and ar- chive through a queer lens. Such work has been tremendously useful in under- scoring how queer spaces are more often than not marked by queer time, and the temporal and affective markings of all spatial categories.28 Specifically, this work has made clear how the spatial categories of region, diaspora, and nation function simultaneously as temporal and affective categories.29 For instance, as Valerie Rohy has argued, the region as subnational location is closely tied to notions of backwardness, anachronism, and abjection in relation to the larger n ation- state.30 As I discuss in chapter 1, contemporary artists such as David Kalal are able to exploit this temporal lag of the region in order to envision new logics of desire and affiliation across multiple times and spaces. Unruly Visions contributes to these collective, ongoing queer reformulations of time, space, affect, and archive by considering how the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora extend and transform our understandings of these concepts. As I argue in the following chapter, a turn to the regional is quite often a turn to the personal and the autobiographical. Evocations of the region often take the form of deeply affective, personal explorations of regional be- longing or alienation. Both the regional and the personal/autobiographical, which emerge as central categories in the work of many of the artists I discuss 10 : Introduction Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/553515/9781478002161-001.pdf by Harvard University user on 14 February 2019