Homesick Blues: Excavating Crooked Intimacies in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Jook Joints

This article traverses the bittersweet antagonisms of home and disorienting counter-privates inhabited by Black laborers during the decades following U.S. Reconstruction. I chart the inception of modem African American homes and the disorderly stages that queered homeliness. Drawing from snippets of oral history, blues lyrics, archival documents, and photographs, I excavate the material and spatial fabric of Black homes and their unruly counterparts jook houses. This article facilitates a cross-disciplinary engagement with affect theory, queer theory, and ontological approaches to materiality in an attempt to understand how jook atmospheres generated disruptive intimacies. In doing so, this article examines how a coalescence of crooked bodies and homesick feelings threatened to throw the order of home into chaos. The assemblage of performers and materials that once resided in these rural spaces crafts a focal point for understanding the transformative possibilities of pleasure erupting in queer Black histories.