Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York
<p>This conversation with Fiona I.B. Ngô focuses on her book, <em>Imperial Blues </em>(2014) that develops a discourse around the simultaneous suppressive and productive aspects of race and sex through a travel in the various geo(chrono)graphies of New York in the 1920s. We talk of the various signs (bodies, objects, spaces) created and worn to reference the imperial vision of that that it is not. We also converse about the movement of bodies, at a transnational level, as much as at the level of the body dancing (“the cops are here, let’s play a waltz!”) without forgetting the movement between various neighborhoods of New York and the potential internal colonialism that can emerge for it. Our conversation ends with a discussion about the formation of black queer bodies, particularly indicated in the art of Robert Bruce Nugent, on which we briefly reflect. (As a sidenote, I apologize for the sonic conditions of this podcast that was recorded in a cafe: everything of what we talked about can be clearly heard but the background noise can, at times, be a bit invasive)</p>
Host: Léopold Lambert
Guests: Fiona I.B. Ngô
Part of: The Funambulist Podcast