Author: Alvin J. Henry Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452964440 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
A groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the black queer past. Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past. Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more.
Author: Nessette Falu Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478027150 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.
Author: Roderick A. Ferguson Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452942463 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture—sexual difference—can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology—Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson—has measured African Americans’s unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans’s culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology’s regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories—the narrative of capital’s emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story—one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison’s project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson’s work introduces a new mode of discourse—which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis—that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.
Author: Kara Keeling Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814748333 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
A serious intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.
Author: Kaitlyn McClung Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am." 0́3 Sylvia Plath There is power in the "I am." Autonomy. Freedom. Presence. Being. Becoming. These are the elements of the Black African diaspora, especially in the African American literary tradition. Even more powerful is the Black authorial imagination of what these elements could mean for the individual and collective Black queer body within various social, political, religious, homosocial, and queer spaces. I will begin by speculating the origins of Black literary respectability politics and homosocial bonds using Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's historical fiction, The Age of Phillis with hopes of reimagining the possibilities of Black queer historical fiction and literary homosocial spaces. While considering the historical context, I will then shift into the literary imagination of Leroy Jones's The Baptism and the toilet to explore the religious, academic, and patriarchal institutions of Black queer oppression and the subsequent literary rebellion. The essay then shifts to Black quare/queer positionality, analyzing Alexis De Veaux's poetic prose Yabo as a modern nonbinary, genre-bending work of Black queer historical fiction to explore the Black conscious quare body and the flesh through time. To close, I use auto theory in conversation with Saeed Jones's book of poetry Prelude to a Bruise to posit the queer body's positionality in familial spaces. Using the contextualized definitions from the terminology section, these literary analyses and the following discussion use a DuBosian theory of double consciousness to examine positionality and spatiality in hopes of bettering the lives of Black queer readers.
Author: Robert Reid-Pharr Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814775020 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
In nine essays on Afrocentrism, anti-Semitism, and other aspects of identity and intellect, Reid-Pharr (English, Johns Hopkins U.) seeks to expose the "essentially impermeable and thus impure nature" of all American identities. "Moreover," he writes, "even as I demonstrate repeatedly the excessive lengths to which many have gone to reproduce the boundaries of various articulations of the self, I continue to emphasize my belief that the great joy of living in the modern world is the recognition that all processes of naming, all names (black, gay, man), are ultimately monuments to the impossibility of ever fully distinguishing self from other. ... We always find the universal." With a thoughtful foreword by science-fiction author Samuel R. Delany (Princeton U.). c. Book News Inc.
Author: Vincent Woodard Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 147984926X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 451
Book Description
Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person’s claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith’s slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.
Author: Robert Reid-Pharr Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814775845 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Once You Go Black is first and foremost a study of a group of black American intellectuals, primarily male, who came to prominence after World War II. At the same time, it is an endeavor to reconsider black Americans as agents, and not simply products, of history. Following the existentialist maxim that experience precedes essence, Robert Reid-Pharr contends that our current notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they been forced on the black community. Instead, he argues, black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural or "God-given" today. In Once You Go Black, Reid-Pharr turns first to the late and relatively unknown novels of the three most prominent Black American writers of the mid-twentieth century-Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. He suggests that each of these authors rejects the idea of the black as innocent, insisting instead upon responsibility within modern society. Reid-Pharr then examines a number of responses to this presumed erosion of black innocence, paying particular attention to articulations of black masculinity by Huey Newton, one of the two founders of the Black Panther Party, and Melvin Van Peebles, director of the classic film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.Shuttling between queer theory, intellectual history, literary close readings, and autobiography, Once You Go Black is a bold, eloquent, and impassioned call to bring the language of choice into the study of black American literature and culture.
Author: Alvin J. Henry
Author: Nessette Falu
Author: Roderick A. Ferguson
Author: Amber Jamilla Musser
Author: Kara Keeling
Author: Thomas Glave
Author: Kaitlyn McClung
Author: Robert Reid-Pharr
Author: Vincent Woodard
Author: Robert Reid-Pharr