Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics Volume 2

For those of us who have been starving since finishing Mercer's 'Welcome to the Jungle' or Fusco's 'English Is Broken Here', this is an excellent book to add to your reading list. Through complex theory and deep analysis, Munoz effectively articulates what many of us know but have difficulty proving to others: lesbian and gay artists of color are producing some of the nation's and the world's most revolutionary and counterhegemonic work. I am especially impressed that he examines work by Black, Latino, and Asian gays. This is a much-needed book for anyone who would like to see people of color come together in coalition. You will be impressed with Munoz's creation. This is not Hemphill's 'Brother to Brother' or Moraga's 'This Bridge Called My Back.' Some readers will be put off by the semiotic language Munoz uses. However, for those who can get through it, you will enjoy this book.

This is a crucial book. It was written by a gay Cuban man who teaches in New York City though he grew up on the suburban lawns that grow on the drained swamp lands of South Florida. The book is all about how artists of color build subjectivities from the suffocating madness of neo-coloniality. We pick up the pieces of a system opposed to us, and we restage it, we push it into having new meanings, and in so doing we disarm, just a little bit, the weight of the world upon us. Muñoz's writings have always been full of beautiful stories. Vaginal Creme Davis, the half-African-American-half-Mexican drag performer who fronts a punk band where she pretends to be a white supremacist militia member because she thinks their look is "really hot". Or Muñoz himself, signing along as a teenager to the racist lyrics of an old X song because he needed their implicit critique of the suffocating conformity of Hialeah's cultural and sexual conservatism. What Muñoz elegantly lays out for us is a strategy for intervening in the public sphere that resists both the deadly paralysis of identification (assimilation with the status quo), or an imagined counter-identification which inevitably only succeeds in reifying the very bifurcating dialectic it seeks to overthrow. What interests Muñoz is what he calls "disidentification", a third way which I can best describe as such: Caliban's strategy of learning the master's language so he may curse him with it, but staged for the Millennium, so that we learn to curse (or desire) with irreverence, humor, rhythm, and while wearing stilettos. Practice theory without this book at your own peril. It is certain to become a seminal influence.

Jose Munoz has written a book which breaks new ground in queer studies. His analysis of queer, colored cultural productions is incisive and unapologetic. A much needed addition to a field which pays lip service but has yet to alter its strong hold on whiteness.