Against the Closet

In The Erotics of RaceAliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman rethinks the role of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used representations of sexual "perversion" toward libratory ends. They used their depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Abdur-Rahman connects particular tropes of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, explaining how particular metaphors, such as sadomasochism or incest, reflected the realities of African Americans' lives, as well as their aspirations, during historical epochs from slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the years of the civil rights and black power movements, to the postcivil rights era of the late twentieth century. Abdur-Rahman brings insights from black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on writing by African Americans including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler. In the process, she explains how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed African Americans' longings for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman argues that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression, political intervention, and cultural self-fashioning.