| Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race Contributor(s): Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822352249 ISBN-13: 9780822352242 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $94.95 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2012 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - African American - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - African American Studies |
| Dewey: 305.896 |
| LCCN: 2011053089 |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 6" W x 9.5" (0.88 lbs) 216 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |