The erotics of race: Identity, sexuality, and one hundred years of (black) American writing (Harriet A. Jacobs, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler)

"The Erotics of Race" investigates the interrelation of race and sexuality within the structures of identity and difference in U.S. culture and in determining axes of (and access to) power within the U.S. polity. It understands sexuality as a main component in the creation and representation of racial difference, and it investigates the ways in which race is implicated in representations of sexuality in American culture and literature. Its critical questions include: How influential or relevant are theories about sexuality and sexual practices to theories about race and ethnic groupings? What power does the erotic, or the sexual, have that it can be used to describe the world of women and people of color and to remake that world in literature? What can readers of American literature learn about the political commitments and aesthetic practices of various authors by scrutinizing representations of sexuality in conjunction with, and as influenced by, representations of race? Finally, how do changes in the way that sexuality is depicted in literature over time mark moments of transformation in American politics and culture?; This study pays particular attention to the liberationist impulse and disruptive impacts of representing transgressive sexualities and alternative domesticities in black cultural productions, even as it historicizes pivotal moments at which ideologies of sexual normalcy and sexual pathology have supported racism and the unfair distribution of rights and resources in American society. By analyzing how representations of sexuality function in literary texts in which race is the dominant category of difference, "The Erotics of Race" probes and explains how the organization of sexuality alternately legitimates and undercuts racial hierarchies and other asymmetric social arrangements over time in our culture. Spanning more than a century of U.S. literary production, this project considers genres from the slave narrative to science fiction and reads an expansive array of writers that includes Harriet Jacobs, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler in order to uncover the ways in which race and sexuality intersect within the structures of identity and difference in U.S. culture and in the making of (African) American literature.