Expanding on the account I give of the aesthetic sociality of blackness in Experiments in Exile, I have been studying the way it, or something like it, operates within the context of the political and economic reconstruction of New York City in the 1970s.  My focus has been on the creative social and aesthetic practices through which those targeted for eviction from the new New York – queer hustlers, teenage gang members, and roving picketers, among others, whose deviant or dissident activities cannot be accommodated – remain and sustain one another.  
   Drawing on the research I have been doing, I will discuss the kinds of mutual aid and protection that structure the motley social formations that take shape in the interstices of the city.  Such formations are perhaps the offspring of what Jacob Riis once described as the “queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements” that made up New York’s unruly and uncontained “other half” at the turn of the century.  They are akin to what Maria Lugones envisions as “hangouts” created by and for those who find themselves at odds with “home” or the “home-shelter-street-police station/jail/asylum-cemetery circle.”  Unsettled, and unenclosed, these formations are permeable, fluid, mobile fields composed of elements which themselves have “ill-defined” edges.  No discrete individual subject can be parsed out and privileged in these fields, no individual standpoint or point of view can be maintained.  There are only the difficulties and pleasures of companionship among those who work together to reconstruct the city in their own ways, for their own purposes.   
   Because films and videos have been my most important primary sources, I have also been studying what happens when film and video artists approach these kinds of fields. If film and video artworks are often understood to be determined by the points of view of their “auteurs,” I consider what can and can’t be registered when such points of view are assumed and how both the separations and the relations they seem to establish might be troubled by the aesthetic sociality of these fields.

Laura HARRIS is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Art & Public Policy at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile:  C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (Fordham University Press, 2019).  Her writing has also been published in Social Text, Women & Performance, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly, sx salon, The UnderCommons Collective Magazine, and other journals.