“Dark Sousveillance”: Queer Intimacies and Sensorial Registers of Black/white Interraciality

Abstract

“Dark Sousveillance”: Queer Intimacies and Sensorial Registers of Black/white Interraciality situates Black/white interraciality as a queer form of desire (Cohen 1997; Somerville 2000; Stallings 2015) and as an object of state and interpersonal surveillance (Browne 2015; Moran 2001; Musser 2014; Pascoe 2009; Sexton 2008). Rejecting the conscription of interraciality into the larger, overlapping projects of anti-black surveillance, “knowability” (Browne 2015), sexual normativity, coupling, and state regulation of desire, this dissertation instead asks after the possibilities of interraciality when visuality and biopolitics are decentered, and instead we make space for its full sensorial dimensions (Stallings 2015). Accordingly, this dissertation explores the genres of horror, absurdity, epistolary narrative, poetry, science fiction, and oral history; I examine works of film such as Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979) and Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2020) to consider how the soundscapes of interraciality materialize in unconventional ways through the potentialities of horror and tragicomedy; I explore interracial epistolary narrative as a form of touch in Pat Parker’s archive; and I analyze the oral histories and “strange temporalities” (Halberstam 2005) of interracial comrades engaged in grassroots organizing efforts through the work of D.C.-based multiracial coalition, Roadwork. I take up this project to consider four primary research questions: 1) What does it mean to study interraciality when the concepts of ‘interracial’ and of the ‘couple’ are both fictions (initially created in service of racial capitalism) made up of two separate people? 2) How does interraciality get hailed to perform normativity, and is it possible for interraciality—as a concept and a set of lived experiences—to complicate the couple form? 3) How might witnessing queer interracial intimacies—in varying forms—offer nuance to questions of attachment, encounter, desire? 4) What might Black/white interraciality (re)make or (re)produce outside of biopolitical regimes and how do we feel the interracial in ways beyond visuality?