## Introduction  
Black/queer/diaspora work emerges from radical black and Third World lesbian feminist art, activism and scholarship, and builds upon the scholarly and programmatic practice of black queer studies and queer of colour critique, to consider the state of diasporic black queer projects in the context of various shifts in empires and affiliations. For at least thirty years, activists, artists and scholars have shown the social and poetic co-articulation of blackness, 'queerness' and nationality - putting together how blackness and oppositional  
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[^0]:    1 Audre Lorde, foreword to Showing our Colors (Opitz et al., 1992).  
consciousness, and blackness and sexual and gender non-conformity, are lived, albeit uneasily. The conjunction of these various streams of work owes much to the maturation of the literature in black and queer of colour studies, and the current existential crisis in queer studies, and also to the recognition of the presence of the transnational in every moment, even 'at home', and the rapidity of popular forms of (uneven) global exchange. In this short summary of the black/queer/diaspora studies project, I hope to provide a sketch of the salient issues and texts in this emergent field. Today, new South-South conversations from the Caribbean to various regions of Africa, Asia and Oceania, for example - and voices from the North, clarifying their simultaneous British-, American-, Canadian- or Europeanness, are beginning to be heard in a framework that is non-national and 'non-Western'.