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A study of race and sexuality and their interdependencies in
American literature from 1945 to 1955, Desegregating Desire
examines the varied strategies used by eight American poets and
novelists to integrate sexuality into their respective depictions
of desegregated places and emergent identities in the aftermath of
World War II. Focusing on both progressive and conventional forms
of cross-race writing and interracial intimacy, the book is
organized around four pairs of writers. Chapter one examines
reimagined domestic places, and the ambivalent desires that define
them, in the southern writing of Elizabeth Bishop and Zora Neale
Hurston. The second chapter; focused on poets Gwendolyn Brooks and
Edwin Denby, analyzes their representations of the postwar American
city, representations which often transpose private desires into a
public imaginary. Chapter three explores how insular racial
communities in the novels of Ann Petry and William Demby were
related to non-normative sexualities emerging in the early Cold
War. The final chapter, focused on damaged desires, considers the
ways that novelists Jo Sinclair and Carl Offord, relocate the
public traumas of desegregation with the private spheres of homes
and psyches. Aligning close textual readings with the segregated
histories and interracial artistic circles that informed these Cold
War writers, this project defines desegregation as both a racial
and sexual phenomenon, one both public and private. In analyzing
more intimate spaces of desegregation shaped by regional, familial,
and psychological upheavals after World War II, Tyler T. Schmidt
argues that ""queer"" desire--understood as same-sex and
interracial desire--redirected American writing and helped shape
the Cold War era's integrationist politics.
An exploration of writers who examine integration through the
charged lens of sexuality A study of race and sexuality and their
interdependencies in American literature from 1945 to 1955,
Desegregating Desire examines the varied strategies used by eight
American poets and novelists to integrate sexuality into their
respective depictions of desegregated places and emergent
identities in the aftermath of World War II. Focusing on both
progressive and conventional forms of cross-race writing and
interracial intimacy, the book is organized around four pairs of
writers. Chapter one examines reimagined domestic places, and the
ambivalent desires that define them, in the southern writing of
Elizabeth Bishop and Zora Neale Hurston. The second chapter,
focused on poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Edwin Denby, analyzes their
representations of the postwar American city, representations that
often transpose private desires into a public imaginary. Chapter
three explores how insular racial communities in the novels of Ann
Petry and William Demby were related to non-normative sexualities
emerging in the early Cold War. The final chapter, focused on
damaged desires, considers the ways that novelists Jo Sinclair and
Carl Offord relocate the public traumas of desegregation with the
private spheres of homes and psyches. Aligning close textual
readings with the segregated histories and interracial artistic
circles that informed these Cold War writers, this project defines
desegregation as both a racial and sexual phenomenon, one both
public and private. In analyzing more intimate spaces of
desegregation shaped by regional, familial, and psychological
upheavals after World War II, Tyler T. Schmidt argues that "queer"
desire--understood as same-sex and interracial desire--redirected
American writing and helped shape the Cold War era's integrationist
politics. Tyler T. Schmidt, New York, New York, is an assistant
professor of English at Lehman College. His work has been published
in African American Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Radical
Teacher.
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