"Versions": This talk will be from my ongoing work with the Hammond organ, black spirituality and the idea, the problem, of gender and sexuality. From my third book in progress, titled "Made Instrument," I ask what happens when we stop thinking about the black church as only, or even primarily, a place of straight men preachers and straight women parishioners? What if we listened to the music? Blackqueerness, our capacity for being in dense and loving and consensual noncoercive relationship, is relinquished to become normal. This, the practice of relinquishment, is the crisis that stands at the center of black social life and its relation to American culture. The Hammond organ and its usage in the Black Church gives a unique way to understand the modern crisis because the church musician, as a character of black popular culture, is very often coded as queer and hypersexualized. Even if not practicing queerness, the characterization is one the musician must negotiate in order to be heard. This talk will feature two stories, one of Brian and Jamal, and the other of Delores and Janice.

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). All his work is about alternatives to normative function and form, the practice of otherwise possibility.

To attend this talk, email David Yearsley at dgy2@cornell.edu for the Zoom information.