Against the Closet

Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780822352419, 9780822352242
• eBook ISBN: 9780822391883
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Social Sciences

In Against the Closet, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.

Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Against the Closet: Racial Logic and the Bodily Basis/Biases of Sexual Identity
• 1. ‘‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’’ : Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives
• 2. Iconographies of Gang Rape: Or, Black Enfranchisement, White Disavowal, and the (Homo)erotics of Lynching
• 3. Desire and Treason in Mid-Twentieth-Century Political Protest Fiction
• 4. Recovering the Little Black Girl Incest and Black American Textuality
• Conclusion: In Memoriam: Michael Jackson, 1958–2009
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index