This work thus pursues 'new' sets of questions, conjuncturally related to perennial ones: Do African and Afrodescendent sexual minorities and gender insurgents share common desires, or conditions, across borders and languages? What 'erotic subjectivities' (Allen, 2011b) and insurgent black queer poetics obtain in sites scholars have previously ignored, or spaces that reach 'across', 'through' and 'between'? What political or affective strategies might be effective for one place or space, but not for others? And finally, what methodologies must we use to track all of this? By what means should we convey our analysis and reflection? Black/queer/ diaspora work surfaces at a moment when the terms 'black', 'queer' and 'diaspora' have already begun to be elaborated beyond the metaphors and concepts offered by any one of these constituencies, and beyond false dichotomies of essentialism and anti-essentialism (Hall, 1996; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994; Carby, 1987; Carby, 1999; Lara, 2006; Glave, 2008a). ${ }^{2}$ Following Rinaldo Walcott's crucial intervention to the effect that a 'diaspora reading practice [...] can disrupt the centrality of nationalist discourses within the black studies project and thereby also allow for an elaboration of a black queer diaspora project' as 'the reconceptualizing of black queer and black diaspora produces both a black queer diaspora and a new black queer theory' (Walcott, 2007), we can thus claim to position black/queer/ diaspora in black studies, queer studies and feminist studies as a 'backbone rather than anomaly' (Johnson and Henderson, 2005, p. xii).  
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