Aberrations in Black

Juxtaposing the works of Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan with those of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Roderick A. Ferguson interrogates canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its pathologization of African American culture. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Aberrations in Black introduces a new mode of discourse that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. Book jacket.

Roderick A. Ferguson is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota