IN A QU*A*RE TIME AND PLACE book release

Tim Stüttgen: IN A QU*A*RE TIME AND PLACE Post-Slavery Temporalities, Blaxploitation, and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism between Intersectionality and Heterogeneity - book is out now! The event will feature film and live presentations, talks and discussion highlighting book's multi-directional elements in light of tim's life and death. also starring: Afrofuturism! Blaxploitation! Sun Ra! Post-Slavery Temporalities in an American and local context! the Tim Stüttgen Archiv! drinks! dj sets! About the book: In this book, Tim Stüttgen looks at the paradigm of post/slavery as an important epistemological break within predominately white gender and queer studies. He is interested in how motifs of black locality, mobilility, and temporality can be used for a perspective, that combines queer theory with notions of race and color; a specifically “quAre” perspective. Stüttgen demonstrates how a sexualization of racism has been a central factor in exclusivist ideologies, but has also been reappropriated and turned around through images and sound; cinema and music. He investigates how Blaxploitation cinema re-appropriated sexualized racist images for its own purposes, and – over time – provided space for more and more complex main characters and subtexts, including queer. From a quAre perspective it is not a simple distinction between hetero and homosexuality that shapes a quAre subject. Rather, it is a number of complex intersections of whiteness and blackness, gender, sexuality, and a classically white, nationalist notion of heteronormativity, that shapes the ones excluded by it – be it “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens”. – Or the avant-garde composer and performer Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Stüttgen writes passionately about Sun Ra and his Arkestra not only as producers of images and mythologies, but also as music: the concerts in their noisy and performative form – including collective improvisation and alien drag. Stüttgens proposes the non-signifiying practices of free jazz interaction as well as the communal and non-familiaristic way of living and producing together, as one quAre assemblage. In his understanding of queerness as a critical position against a totalizing present, Stüttgen argues for a quAre future of hope and fabulation. As such, this book is written in order to inspire to a new approach to quAre politics. He describes it as “not just a strategical intervention into some sort of canon, but as a way of remembering past crimes which cannot be erased, and pursuing future utopias that not only might change the canon of white queer studies, but also the political imaginary of anybody motivated to critique sexism, racism, homophobia, and nationalism alike. the book is available for purchase here: http://www.b-books.de/index.html