Description
Book SynopsisPart of the American Literatures Initiative Series
2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association
Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.
Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blac
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A powerful theoretical statement in the emerging field of black queer studies, Extravagant Abjection makes the bold claim that it is necessary to work through and not simply to & white wash the political, social, ideological, and psychological consequences of what Darieck Scott names & black abjection. Building upon the insights of the more articulate practitioners of bondage and submission, Sadism and Masochism, Scotts readings of key texts in twentieth century Black American literature are at once sophisticated, provocative, creative, and indeed titillating. This book will surely become a & dark classic. -- Robert Reid-Pharr,author of Once You Go Black
According to Darieck Scott, the awful legacies of racial difference and debasement are not inevitable. And so in Extravagant Abjection, he deftly paves the way for new understandings of the history and culture of black power and violence. His work is theoretically exciting and sophisticated, offering invaluable lessons: that the violent pressure of black historythe pressure of its terrible subordinationcan be relieved, often in unexpected ways. Scott helps us see, even in the most humiliating and violent of scenes, an entire horizon of other, sometimes pleasurable, possibilities of resistance. -- Michael Cobb,author of God Hates Fags
[Scott] arrives at the provocative notion that it is the black body's status as brought into being by and through past trauma that makes it best positioned to tap the inherent powers of abjection. * American Literature *
Extravagant Abjections suturing of bottoming and volitional powerlessness, a mere and indeterminate power, reframes a sexual politics that only recognizes a notion of freedom approaching an infinity curvethe liberatory horizon that queer theory as too often yearned for. * GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Blackness, Abjection, and Sexuality 1 Fanon's Muscles: (Black) Power Revisited2 "A Race That Could Be So Dealt With": Terror, Time, and (Black) Power3 Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject Notes on Black (Power) Bottoms 4 The Occupied Territory: Homosexuality and History in Amiri Baraka's Black Arts 5 Porn and the N-Word: Lust, Samuel Delany's The Mad Man, and a Derangement of Body and Sense(s) Conclusion: Extravagant Abjection NotesIndex About the Author
