Limbologics

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues that limbo is a chronic aspect of black queer life and thus the tools this community has developed in responding to these experiences might offer solutions for dealing with the acceleration of disaster in the twenty-first century. The author offers an analytical category and practice he calls limbologics: the production of indeterminate ontologies, temporal and spatial imaginaries that are created in relation to conditions of encroachment and violence. Through personal narrative, ethnography, and artist interviews Chapman situates black queer performance within limbo as an African Diasporic cosmology and aesthetic. He argues that we must grapple with crisis as limbo because the analogy gives us something we would not get with any other concept. That something is what is needed to move us toward a place where even in the midst of immanent disaster the most marginal of us, and/or unlikely parts of ourselves, can still live. This essay takes important steps in linking the suffering of people during the COVID-19 pandemic; historical legacies of radical Black and queer creativity; and some of the black queer aesthetics thriving in contemporary New Orleans. These practices produce new geographies of hope in the face of uncertainty.