Description
Book SynopsisBoth a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, this book introduces the eloquent voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism.
Trade ReviewReid-Pharr brilliantly puts the ambivalences of bodily pleasure back into the serious business of identity politics. * Project Muse Book Review *
Repeated readings are richly rewarded. * CHOICE *
A wonderful thing of work and play, feeling and thought, that moves through my brain as though I needed to be reminded of why I chose life as an intellectual. Reading Black Gay Man I realized once again that we all do indeed need to be reminded that to think, write, and read about identity, in this moment of fear and hysteria around a & different' world, is to assist a necessary articulation: the new trying to make itself out ofnot separate fromthe carcass of the old. -- Wahneema Lubiano,Duke University
Considering political events, publications, social movements and cultural developments that emerge from the early 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Robert Reid-Pharr looks outward so as to interrogate the very self he is understood to comprise. The result is a sort of anti-memoir of black gay male experience—a sustained rumination that so insistently inhabits the terms of that identity that it explodes them from the inside, making it impossible for any of us to bear them in quite the same way that we previously had. -- Phillip Brian Harper,author of Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Startling and provocative. . . . Reid-Pharr presents a cogent analysis that combines the personal with the political, the intellectual with the emotional and the erotic. . . . Reid-Pharr's ability to move these works-and their themes-from the limited analysis of the academy into a broader realm of lived experience and social context that makes them, as well as Reid-Pharr's own thoughts, vital and genuinely consequential. * Publisher's Weekly *
