Queer aromanticisms: Doom and bloom in Moses Sumney’s Blackalachia

This article offers queer methods for reading aromanticism – the absence of romantic attraction – in cultural production. Focusing on Ghanaian American musician Moses Sumney, the article analyses how his concert film Blackalachia centres isolation and the lack of romantic love as part of utopian possibilities. Sumney deploys what I call ‘queer aromanticisms’, articulations of aromantic affects without a claim to aromantic identity. Sumney titled his 2017 album Aromanticism as a gesture towards aromantic sensibilities, but he expresses ambivalence around identifying as aromantic; ‘I am, and I am not’, he says. Building on queer theoretical accounts of subjectless critique and José Muñoz’s idea of disidentification, I argue that Sumney’s non-identification is itself a queer tactic for resisting amatonormativity – the insistence on romantic love as a metric of human worth. To conclude, I argue that aromanticism in cultural production actively queers cultures beyond those minorities who identify outright as aromantic or asexual.