Strangers in Fluency: The Flows and Flowers Touching Sovereignty

How else could we practice our strangeness together? Retransmitting the question in dispersal, in the absorbent, jubilant cry of all things: a frequency with and from which the Black radical imagination derives. We—a ‘we’ that sounds unprepared—listen to Claire Denis’s poetics via one of her films, Beau Travail (1999), to keep this frequency fluffy, aerial, wanting to pursue far beyond what colonialism negotiates with it, skillfully leaves in it, its alphabets and genres of separations, and unmoor from those shores of univocal expression softly, delicately, with our fugitive intention as our only breath.

Ronald Rose-Antoinette  is a Martinican scholar and curator currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Art Theory and Criticism, and engage two broad areas: twentieth and twenty-first centuries black and queer diasporic literatures and aesthetics; and plantation economy, globalization and transnationalism.