From the Publisher
"In this interesting study of queerness and identity politics, Munoz (performance studies, New York Univ.) invites readers to look beyond the immediate present and toward a queer future."-CHOICE,
"As his beautiful book makes abundantly clear, Jose is on a mission to change the world, or at least to imagine (I'm quoting) 'a place and time... fuller, vaster, more sensual, brighter.'... Jose's is a book which sustains rigor even as it occasionally indulges in the anecdotal."-Barbara Browning, Social Text/Periscope,
"In both Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications, Muñoz traces his queer theoretical genealogy through sources as varied as women-of-color feminism on the one hand, and a certain tradition of Marxian thought on the other. He cruises theory, moving seamlessly from Anzaldúa and Alarcón to Ernst Bloch, CLR James, Adorno, Derrida and Raymond Williams, those figures in leftist thought whose work is not typically mined within queer scholarship. Similarly if we trace the genealogy of what has now come to be known as queer of color and queer diasporic critique, Muñoz's work--with its insistence on the endlessly imaginative modes of being that emerge within queer, and particularly queer of color, subcultures--stands as a crucial milestone."-Gayatri Gopinath, Social Text/Periscope,
"Cruising Utopia opens in full song, in a complex contrapuntal (Cuban?) chant, equal parts poetry and counterpolemic, in order to usher in a crowd, a choreographic mass of often queer interlocutors as likely to come from a literary (O'Hara, Schuyler, Myles) as from a critical-philosophical (beyond the Germans, and perhaps too briefly: Butler, Felman, Sedgwick) tradition, as from the worlds of art, pop, and performance. "-Ricardo Ortiz, Social Text/Periscope,
"I love the "Public Sex" and "After Jack" chapters the best, and think the O'Hara discussion is brilliant and perfectly emblematic of the project to extract the utopian from moments of affective density that are lived. But all of the writing is astonishing, vibrant and memorable."-Lauren Berlant, Social Text/Periscope,