Rico Norwood – A Quare Gaze

Busy Being Black

I’m in conversation with Rico Norwood, who opens our conversation with a beautiful and important introduction to Isaac Julien’s seminal film Looking for Langston. As well as doing more justice to Looking for Langston’s importance than I could, we open with this introduction because Rico flags an important word “quare”, which – as some of you already know – I have tattooed right across my throat. “Quare” was put forward by E. Patrick Johnson, the fairy godfather of Black queer studies, in his 2001 essay, “Quare studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother”. Part of what animates Johnson’s theoretical intervention is an understanding that Black queer people and the non-queer people who birth, nurture and raise us, often have much more to offer the world than we’re given credit for.

It is a “quareness” that energises my own cultural and intellectual inquiry and which brings me and Rico together, both as friends and conversation partners. Today we explore Looking for Langston’s ongoing importance, the role cultural institutions like the BFI play in either gatekeeping or providing access to our quare cultural canons and how politics of respectability and representation continue to hinder our collective cultural memory. And together we attempt to answer an enduring question, one addressed often on Busy Being Black, how do we ensure that work that could be so important to our liberation isn’t so continually withheld from us?

About Rico Norwood

Rico Norwood (they/them) is an American Film and Video Game researcher out of the University of Southampton, who currently resides in London and Berlin. They hail from Houston, Texas but received their undergraduate degree in Mass Communications from Xavier University of New Orleans and their M.A. in Media Studies at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. Their primary academic concerns are Black Queer Art and historical narratives through films, as well as Video Game studies with regards to race, gender, sexuality, and their development.

About Busy Being Black

Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.

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Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter.

Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black.

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