{"product_id":"9781517910068-black-queer-flesh","title":"Black Queer Flesh","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel. \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlack Queer Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHenry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In \u003ci\u003eQuicksand and Passing\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eInvisible Man\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eWayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlack Queer Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e is an original and necessary contribution to Black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40829763059809,"sku":"9781517910068","price":22.47,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/06f141ad4411eee240e285989be361fb.png?v=1683812851","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9781517910068-black-queer-flesh","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}