The Specter of Blackness: Queering Sudanese Masculinities in the Black Atlantic

Abstract: This article reads the life and work of British-Sudanese actor Alexander Siddig ( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Game of Thrones , Shantaram ) alongside the 1966 English translation of Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North . Tracing the abstraction and obfuscation of Blackness in public and scholarly imaginaries, this essay suggests we use the literatures and theories of the Black Atlantic—with their richly fluid repertoire of ghosts, tricksters, and mirrors—to read the Sudanese masculinities in Siddig and Salih’s work as simultaneously Black, diasporic, and queer.