Son[i]a #456
Neo Sinoxolo Musangi
Queer feminist thinker Neo Sinoxolo Musangi (b. Olkejuado, Kenya) works in their own present and situated space between art, academia, and creative writing. In their poetic, inquisitive practice, thinking is spoken out loud and ideas emerge in fragments, folds, and leaps, embracing contradiction, uncertainty, and incompleteness as tools for imagining other possible forms of enunciation.
Wary of the cultural flows of the Global North, Musangi exercises an incisive, critical reflection on queer, Black and African identities, rooted in the ground of their native continent and in embodied feeling. In both method and form, their practice draws on narrative, moving away from abstraction in order to explore thought through lived encounters, conversations, and everyday situations that raise broader questions. Biographical material is central to their work: lives that do not fit into or are thwarted by normative structures come into themselves in theory. And the archive overflows institutional frameworks so that bodies, emotions, and family histories are included as spaces where knowledge is produced and sustained.
In this podcast, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi invites us into their spiral of fragmented, present, embodied thought. We talk about writing as performance, about poetry, and about a rigorous orality. We turn our attention to the small, irrelevant stories, silences, and gaps in the archive. And we examine borrowed vernaculars and harmful acronyms, as well as the tensions and overlaps between categories such as queer, Blackness and Africanness –and what it means to think from within them.
Conversation: Jara Rocha and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: pantea. Sounds: RWM sound library.
ATTRIBUTION/NON-COMMERCIAL/SHARE-ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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