Paper short abstract:

In Newark, the Ironbound neighborhood is ideologically marked racially white. My ethnography points to a narrative of relational creativity among queer black, brown, and white nightlife goers through karaoke that transcends the city's racial divides and has engendered a worldmaking of "one Newark."

Paper long abstract:

In Newark, New Jersey, an African American and Latinx majority city, the Ironbound neighborhood has been marked both racially and ideologically as racially white. From the late 1960s into the late 1990s, the Ironbound gained notable influxes of Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants who sustained a predominant and marketable Lusophone culture in the neighborhood along with a growing presence of Hispanophone (largely Ecuadorian and Mexican) immigrants and African Americans. Since the late 1990s, city government officials, journalists, and historians have distinguished the Ironbound and its residents as a model of individual hard work and enterprise in its black and brown majority city, recognizing the neighborhood's highly desired ethnic market and heteronormative service labor force, which contributes to Newark's neoliberal economic redevelopment and revitalization. This dominant local narrative has sustained sharp racial boundaries of whiteness and blackness such that even the city's LGBTQ community is centered in black Newark. My critical and embodied ethnography of queer nightlife in the Ironbound, conducted in 2004-2009 and 2019-2020, points to an alternative narrative of informal relational creativity among Brazilians, Portuguese, African Americans and Latinx nightlife goers through karaoke. In particular, through song selection and performance, this nightlife karaoke facilitates a dialogue of relationality in which nightlife goers cross racialized and sexualized boundaries in ways that contrast with static state narratives about Newark's steep racial divides. I argue that this social engagement has engendered a worldmaking of "one Newark" that alerts queer Newark residents and their allies to shared interests, values, and needs.