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Chapter 4 explores the interface of archive, affect, and the everyday in the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora. It examines in tandem a memoir by African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, the photography of Allan deSouza, a collaborative multimedia project by the artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, and the work of Lebanese visual artist Akram Zaatari. In their work, queer diasporic affect becomes the portal through which history, memory, and the process of archiving itself are reworked in order to critique the ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, war and occupation, and contemporary forms of racialization, as well as to imagine alternative forms of affiliation and collectivity. The materiality of the everyday—the antimonumental, the small, the inconsequential—is closely linked to this project of excavating the past. The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora are in fact archival practices; they mobilize the affective register to make apparent the everyday intimacies of bodies, landscapes, histories, and temporalities.

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