Tavia Nyong'o

Tavia Nyong'o
Occupation	academic
Website	https://tavianyongo.com/

Tavia Nyong'o is an American cultural critic, historian and performance studies scholar.

He is currently a Professor of American Studies at Yale University where he teaches courses on black diaspora performance, cultural studies, social and critical theory.

Nyong'o received his B.A. from Wesleyan University. He then received a Marshall Scholarship to study at the University of Birmingham. In 2003, he received his PhD in American Studies from Yale, where he studied under the mentorship of Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach. Nyong'o was the 2004 runner-up for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Award given by the American Studies Association annually for the best doctoral dissertation written in the field of American Studies. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, is published by the University of Minnesota Press (2009), and won the Errol Hill Award.

In addition, Nyong'o has published articles in The Nation, n+1, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, GLQ, and Women and Performance. He has written on racial kitsch, televised politics, Afro-punk aesthetics, and on African American historical memory.

He is a cousin of Academy Award winning actress Lupita Nyong'o.

Writing

Tavia Nyong'o is the author of the essay "'I've Got You Under My Skin' Queer Assemblages, Lyrical Nostalgia and the African Diaspora". In his essay, Nyong'o explores the meaning of the word "diaspora". He is especially interested in the translocal community-building potential, of music, but worries that the very mobilizing and empowering aspects of diasporic music—a channel of community belonging—also divides and destroys communities. He writes, "The close affiliation of popular music with seduction, romance and sex speaks to the anxiety with which queerness is policed within it."

Nyong'o's most recent monograph is entitled Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, published in November 2018. The book is a cultural history and critical reading of different modern and contemporary black cultural products in various media. From fiction to photography and artificial intelligence, Nyong'o reads and argues for political potential in and poetic power of black cultural imagination. The work thus critiques genealogies and discourses that do not uphold or acknowledge the creative potential of blackness to exist beyond conditions of death and violence.

Art, and especially Black Queer art, is thus not only a response to or reflection of racism, violence, and death; it rather has the potential to change and exceed these conditions towards a critical state of "fabulation" that cannot be captured, constrained or killed. Nyong'o's close reading of literary texts, photos and fictitious supernatural characters, mobilizes performance and imagination as the main emblems of that fabulation, in order to refuse erasure from cultural memory and assert its presence and futurity against and beyond suffering.

Afro-Fabulations takes up Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation to articulate "how to do things with black queer and trans archives;" in other words, Nyong'o explores the means through which queer of color cultural production rearranges and unsettles teleological narratives and reworks the conditions of subjugation by subverting truth and falsity to envision and activate a living otherwise. To this end, Nyong'o posits the term "angular sociality" which he define as "a mode of black temporality" that "names a dynamic interaction or entanglement of bodies, each keeping their own time" Angular sociality is, in part, a critique of the antirelational thesis in queer theory insofar that, for Nyong'o, "black performance is always already a relational theory and an emancipatory figure at the center of every social struggle." This entanglement of bodies necessarily include the deceased, or a living with death, that Nyong'o understands as necessary to articulate loss (redress as opposed to reparation), activating difficult but necessary relationships to the past against its erasure. Explicating the work of musician and performance artist Geo Wyeth, for instance, Nyong'o understands this living with death and the violent past not as a radically transformative act which reorganizes normative modes or relations, but rather, as Wyeth states in an interview with the author, "deeper reminders of how close this is, and that makes room in some way for joy and makes room for the future, and makes room for laughing in some way at the absurdity of all this , this deluge of inherited structures."

External links

• "The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory"
• NYU Performance Studies bio on Nyong'o – accessed on 2007-05-15
• Nyongo's CV
• Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Award