Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 926-950
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN KAHAN ◽  
MADOKA KISHI
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Race and Sexuality

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassan Moussawi ◽  
Vrushali Patil
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has become crucial to any exploration of sexuality. In addition, studies of race and sexuality look at how they have historically informed and continue to inform one another, in ways that include thinking about empire, Racisms, carcerality, surveillance, criminology, deviance, desire, and changing understanding of the erotic. Both intersectional and transnational work consider multiple racial formations and take into account the multiple genealogies of sexuality studies, centralizing work that is informed by women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, queer theory, and black feminist thought. To best understand racial and sexual formations, race and sexuality studies allow us to think of the two as always informing one another. Thus it shifts our attention from primarily thinking about stable identity categories and culture to centralizing people’s relations to power.

Animating Cane: Race, Affect, History and Jean Toomer

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Emotional Expressiveness ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Racism ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter explores the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness. In his 1923 experimental volume Cane, Toomer not only invites readers to question whether such affects “belong” to the subject, but employs these stereotypes to offer an embodied, affective history of American racism. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of racial “animatedness,” which captures the slippage from vitality and exuberance to a powerless, puppet-like state of innervated, non-intentional agitation, the chapter argues that Toomer uses affective stereotypes to diagnose the powerlessness of his subjects and to narrate a traumatic history in which persons are confused with things.

Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 158
Author(s):  
Charles Scruggs ◽  
Genevieve Fabre ◽  
Michael Feith
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

scholarly journals Building on Young Children's Cultural Histories through Placemaking in the Classroom

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 332-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lenny Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Land Development ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Development Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Grade Classroom ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This article suggests placemaking as a framework to more deeply understand how teaching and learning can take into account young children's cultural histories. Placemaking, a form of analysis commonly found in land development literature, critically interprets the relationship between power, politics and the production of place. In this article, parallels are drawn between several tenets of placemaking, such as surveillance, self-definition, and a consciousness of solidarity, and the curricular spaces of a second-grade classroom as the children and their teacher participate in a biography project centered on the Harlem Renaissance. Through analysis of the class-wide inquiry, this article sheds light on the possibility for cultivating children's cultural imagination through placemaking in spite of political practices attempting to define in more narrow terms how teachers and children are to participate in the schooling spaces they inhabit.

Morality and Art

Dangerous Art ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
James Harold
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter sets out the main questions to be explored more fully in the chapters to follow. It does this by studying three well-known debates about morality and art: from classical China, the debate between Mozi and Xunzi about the value of music; from ancient Greece, the difference between Plato and Aristotle over poetry; and from the Harlem Renaissance, the argument between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke over the value of art as propaganda. The chapter concludes by showing that the problem of morality and art has three main parts: the morality of the artist; the effects of art on the audience; and the relationship between art and moral knowledge. The chapter also serves to set out some arguments and positions that are made use of later in the book.

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