Michael Brown to Michael Johnson: An American Experiment of the BlackQueer

This talk was drawn from a chapter in McCune's book in progress, Disobedient Reading: An Experiment in Seeing Black. In this manuscript, McCune offers new reading practices for what is formed at sites which may be understood as canonical, formative institutions in the production of black life and death. McCune offers BlackQueer as a heuristic, or interpretative frame, to understand the positionality of black subjects whose relationship to the state and its agents has always been, and continues to be, alien, marginal, and vexed.