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Elsewhere & Otherwise: Imagination & Worldmaking in the Black Queer Studies Collection

This exhibition is meant to highlight the rich holdings found within the Black Queer Studies Collection. The materials brought together in this exhibition recognizes the cultural productions by Black queer subjects from across the African diaspora. The grounding ethos animating this exhibition is the connection between the personal and the political, the individual and the communal, the local and the global. This exhibition attempts to elucidate how the personal desires and yearnings of Black queer subjects are a metonym for a larger process of world-shifting change. This exhibition demonstrates how desire for Black queer self-making is tantamount to a desire for a world beyond normative constraints. Through creative expression and critical inquiry across multiple media and disciplines, Black queer subjects present the possibility of new ways of beings from their particular vantage point in our globalized world.



About the Black Queer Studies Collection

The Black Queer Studies Collection, which is designated digitally through notes in library catalog records, is meant to feature, promote and increase the discoverability of the UT Libraries’ unique holdings in the area of African and African Diasporic Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. The Black Queer Studies Collection is a groundbreaking project in librarianship in that it addresses standard obstacles posed by the Library of Congress Subject Headings and information retrieval systems to locating materials by and about Black Diasporic LGBTQ people.

The collection grows with annual support from the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of English, and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.