Militz-Frielink Jafari S. Allen

Allen's Veneceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba disrupts the notion of a universal queer subject, challenges interdisciplinary assumptions about race, sexuality, and gender, and creates a space for individuals whose multiple subaltern identities have left them illegible to the state and most scholars. Using multiple theoretical tools and methodologies, Allen's analysis of Black Self-Making in Cuba helps develop a more nuanced understanding of transnational black queer theory.  In the first part of Allen's book, he does a genealogy of discourse exploring the historical, sociopolitical, and ideological terrain of (post)socialist Cuba. In the second, Allen examines what he calls erotic self-making (individual and collective responses to reglobalization) which contributes to the creation of new political and social subjects (ivities).  

I found Allen's work to be helpful to my research as it provides an example of how one scholar might create a new theoretical framework building on various interdisciplinary methods/theories and an analysis of understudied individuals in post-socialist Cuba. As part of my dissertation, I would like to do a genealogy of discourse on transnational feminist definitions of practices of non-religious spirituality. I also like how Allen's work took us beyond an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and sexuality and into an interstitial space where individuals with  multiple subaltern identities interact/react to historical, sociopolitical, and ideological forces. I like how Allen started his analysis from this space because it guarded him from oversimplifying themes that emerge in his data analysis. I especially enjoyed the dialogue Allen weaved through out the book between the interlocutors and himself. I like the way Allen forced himself to think about his ethnographer's privilege, which allowed him to pause during conversations with interlocutors and let them more fully express themselves without any interruption from the researcher.

While this book was very helpful as it provided a contemporary example of how to create new theories and research methodology, it left me more perplexed because I had trouble imagining myself doing anything remotely close to this work.  Allen's genealogy of discourse was so thorough and spanned across so many factors--historical, sociopolitical, ideological as well as the interstitial spaces between race, gender, and sexuality, that it intimidated me as scholar.  A project like this would easily take years.  I did note that he started his work in Cuba in 1998, so perhaps this is a decade long project and my hesitations are warranted. Hence, I do not believe it would be realistic to do this in depth analysis for a dissertation alone.  My question is: How do I do a genealogy of discourse that is more manageable in a shorter amount of time? What are some examples of articles we have read in class (or will read) that may provide an example of a realistic genealogy of discourse?