In "Against the Closet," Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and
challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual
transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from
the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers
used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories
of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference
in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression
to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes
such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of
particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and
political redress from the time of slavery, through
post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements,
to the late twentieth century.
Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical
race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres
from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by
African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline
Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she
shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality
expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and
collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those
representations were fundamental to the development of African
American forms of literary expression and modes of political
intervention and cultural self-fashioning.
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