Black-Radical-Tradition on emsenn.net

Disidentification

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disidentification is a concept developed by José Esteban Muñoz in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). It names a third mode of engaging with dominant ideology, beyond identification (assimilation into the norm) and counter-identification (blanket rejection of the norm). Disidentification works on and against dominant codes simultaneously — recycling, reworking, and repurposing encoded meaning rather than accepting or refusing it wholesale.

Muñoz developed the concept to describe the survival strategies of queers of color navigating a public sphere structured by white supremacy and heteronormativity. When the available cultural scripts are scripts of exclusion, neither identification (performing the norm that excludes you) nor counter-identification (refusing engagement entirely) is viable. Disidentification is the tactical engagement with dominant culture that transforms it in the act of using it — performing a role improperly, inhabiting a category against its intended use, reading a text against its grain.

Queer of Color Analysis

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Queer of color analysis is a method developed by Roderick Ferguson in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004). It names an analytical practice that reads the co-constitution of race, sexuality, gender, and political economy rather than treating any of these as autonomous axes of oppression that can be analyzed in isolation.

Ferguson’s central argument is that canonical sociology — from the Chicago School through Daniel Patrick Moynihan — produced Black culture as pathological by measuring it against norms of white heterosexual domesticity. The “deviance” attributed to Black communities (non-nuclear kinship, informal economies, non-reproductive sexuality) was not a failure to achieve normativity but a product of racial capitalism’s organization of labor, kinship, and intimacy. Capital required certain populations to live outside normative domesticity — as migrant workers, as domestic servants, as surplus labor — and then designated the social forms produced by that exclusion as deviant.

The Black Radical Tradition and Russian Semiotics

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This text surveys the engagement between thinkers in the Black radical tradition and Russian semiotic theory (the Moscow-Tartu school, the Bakhtin Circle, and Russian Formalism). The connections range from direct citation and critical appropriation to structural parallels that operate without explicit acknowledgment.

¶Direct Engagements

¶Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mikhail Bakhtin

The most sustained and explicit engagement between these two traditions appears in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988). Gates builds his theory of Signifyin(g) on a synthesis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “double-voiced word.” Gates uses Bakhtin to argue that Signifyin(g) works by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word that already has and retains its own orientation.