Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

328 Pages·2010·2.228 MB·English

by  Darieck Scott

Extravagant Abjection
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
José Quiroga
Murdering Masculinities:
Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
Black Gay Man: Essays
Robert Reid Pharr, Foreword by Samuel R. Delany
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg
The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity
Paul Morrison
The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron-Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr
The Latino Body:
Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lázaro Lima
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection
Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the
African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2010 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Darieck.
Extravagant abjection : blackness, power, and sexuality in the African American literary
imagination / Darieck Scott.
p. cm. — (Sexual cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4094-1 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-4094-4 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4095-8 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-4095-2 (pb : alk. paper)
[etc.]
1. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. African American
men in literature. 3. Power (Social sciences) in literature. 4. Race relations in literature.
5. Rape in literature. 6. Homosexuality in literature. 7. Pornography in literature. 8. Abjection
in literature. I. Title.
PS374.N4S36 2010
813'5409896073—dc22 2010002954
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Blackness, Abjection, and Sexuality 1
1 Fanon’s Muscles: (Black) Power Revisited 32
2 “A Race That Could Be So Dealt With”: Terror, Time, 95
and (Black) Power
3 Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject 126
Notes on Black (Power) Bottoms 153
4 The Occupied Territory: Homosexuality and History 172
in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts
5 Porn and the N-Word: Lust, Samuel Delany’s 204
The Mad Man, and a Derangement of Body and Sense(s)
Conclusion: Extravagant Abjection 257
Notes 271
Index 301
About the Author 318
vii

Acknowledgments
I CANNOT THANK enough Julie Carlson and Lisa Moore, who con-
tributed hours and ergs of intellectual and editorial support—as well as
calming professional advice—through several stages of the development
of Extravagant Abjection: true dear friends and super-colleagues both.
Many other colleagues and friends in the English departments of UC–
Santa Barbara and UT–Austin were chapter readers, and sources of advice,
encouragement, and inspiration: At UCSB I am especially grateful to Rita
Raley, Guy Mark Foster, Chris Newfield, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Stepha-
nie LeMenager, and Aranye Fradenburg, as well as to all the excellent
students (from various departments) in my graduate seminars on Fanon,
neo-slave narratives, and black masculinity and abjection. My department
chairs during my time at UCSB, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones and William Warner,
were generous in ensuring I had as much time as possible to work on this
monograph, and in providing guidance and feedback during the process
of writing. At UT–Austin I enjoyed an abundance of riches in terms of
dynamic, inspirational, and fun colleagues, whose intellectual stimulation
and companionship I continue to miss—I would particularly like to thank
Ann Cvetkovich, Joanna Brooks, Barbara Harlow, Helena Woodard, Mia
Carter, my chair Jim Garrison, and the ebullient students of my very first
graduate seminar on Fanon.
My Ph.D. studies at Stanford in Modern Thought and Literature of
course were the foundation for this first academic book project. I am
grateful to my wise and generous dissertation adviser and mentor Ramón
Saldívar, and to Mary Pratt, Renato Rosaldo, Sharon Holland, Yvonne Yar-
bro-Bejarano, and Horace Porter. As Hazel Carby—whose graduate semi-
nar on race, gender, and the culture industry at Yale is largely responsible
for my decision to pursue a Ph.D., and who, along with my M.A. thesis
adviser Vera Kutzkinski, I also would like to thank—once advised me,
fellow graduate students are as much your teachers as professors are, and
this proved to be very true for me: I and this project have been hugely
ix
x Acknowledgments
influenced by, and I am especially grateful to, Danny Contreras, Lisa
Thompson, and Diana Paulin, and also to the whole host of my fabulous
fellows in MTL.
Thoughtful observations and encouragement along the way from the
late Barbara Christian, Lauren Berlant, Ken Warren, E. Patrick Johnson,
Dwight McBride, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Phillip Brian Harper, Howard
Winant, Elizabeth Abel, Abdul JanMohamed, Ian Duncan, and Geoff
Mann were of invaluable assistance.
Of crucial importance was institutional support in the form of fellow-
ships and faculty education from the Ford Foundation, the UC President’s
Postdoctoral Fellowship program, UCSB’s Faculty Career Development
Award, and the 2004 UC Humanities Research Institute’s faculty seminar
on psychoanalysis.
Many thanks also for the attentive and ever-helpful shepherding of this
project by my editor, Eric Zinner, and his assistant, Ciara McLaughlin,
and Sexual Cultures series editors, José Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini, at New
York University Press. Michael Cobb and Robert Reid-Pharr disclosed to
me their roles as manuscript reviewers for NYU; I am deeply grateful for
their criticism and enthusiasm.
In every writing project I have had the luxury of vital emotional and
spiritual support—and no small amount of editorial assistance—from my
partner, Stephen Liacouras, and this has never been more true than during
the long, long process of bringing Extravagant Abjection to fruition; I am
profusely grateful for his presence, generosity, and tireless cheerleading.