Cruising the Past explores how queer of color literature, art, and theory stage unexpected, playful, and even uneasy attachments to the premodern past. Complementing queer of color critique’s continued consideration of queer time and futurity, the essays in this issue navigate ancient, medieval, and early modern histories, figures, and literatures in order to creatively illuminate how they intersect with modern formations of race, gender, and sexuality. By showcasing the ways that queers of color—including many of the issue’s authors—across an array of cultures, religions, and geographies have negotiated their often fraught relations with the distant past, Cruising the Past develops a concept of history that is just as much a constraint on as it is a resource for queer aesthetics, theory, and politics—that is, simultaneously the foundation of invidious structures of power and a means through which to subject such structures to queer critique.
