Flamboyant: Tracing Queer Kinship, Solidarity and Diasporic Currents

In this paper, I will explore transnational modes of solidarity and cultures of exchange through looking at black and brown queer and feminist organisations from the 1980s in Europe, who’ve worked intimately with Black American, South African and Caribbean feminists, and cultural producers. Through mapping these alliances, I argue that a different configuration of post-colonial Europe can be offered, through a queer practice, and by extension the situated located knowledges will shift, allowing for a re-mastering of archival images and text, and expanding the scope of transnational cultural production. Drawing on the work of Fatima El-Tayeb (2011), Brent Hayes Edwards (2003), Gloria Wekker (2006) and Sara Ahmed (2017), I produce an alternative affective memory scape, which reflects on kinship, solidarity and interrogates the meaning of transnational alliances in the present day. In doing so, this paper presents new methodologies on queer transnational feminist and archival research, and is focused on remaking a queer geography of Europe. By bringing together reflections on artistic and cultural production, this paper follows the currents of diasporic exchange, and re-situates intimate knowledge production by black and brown communities rooted in pleasure and intimacy.

* Flamboyant refers to the first black and women of colour archive and documentation center in the Netherlands, named after the Flamboyant tree.