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I begin today by asking y'all to flip it. No, I don't mean to turn a somersault. I mean "flip the script" That is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines "flip" "to make an unexpected or dramatic change. Also: to reverse the usual or preexisting positions in a situation; to turn the tables"1 "Flipping the script" means to invert or disrupt dominant paradigms-narratives-to challenge and defy exogenous and constrictive categories and to engage in discursive practices and performative acts that push against the bounds and binds of existing social relations and power structures. Our gathering at "Queer AMS of Color" or, rather, "Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship" marks the institutional beginnings of the ways in which we can begin to flip and queer the script with respect to both the larger institution of the American Musicological Society and the LGBTQ Study Group.
The scholarly literature about African American-as well as African and global African diasporic-music (like black bodies) both expresses and engages struggle. The academic project does not just study; instead, it falls beside and sometimes couples with a range of social, cultural, and political movements along a continuum from social commentary and critique to outright political action and revolution. Historically, black LGBTQIA have been left out of academic music's historiography and excluded from conversations both within and without the LGBTQIA academic music community-something I began to explore at the Columbia University December 2015 symposium honoring Suzanne Cusick, "Women, Music, Power" That this is so comes as no surprise; nor am I alone in beginning to confront the issue of race and LGBTQIA. Several recent African American theorists have argued that the term "queer" excludes, erases, or minimalizes people of color and their cultural productions. E. Patrick Johnson theorizes quare studies, which "addresses the concerns and needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people across issues of race, gender, class, and other subject positions."2 Francesca T. Royster applies quare theory to postsoul music, examining both LGBTQIA artists and how a range of musicians explores gender and nonheteronormative sexuality.3 Sheena C. Howard explores intersectional black lesbian identity.4 Thus, today, I proceed to flip the script and move beyond identifying a concern in order to offer one approach to queering black music: through the prism of Afrofuturism and...