| My dissertation challenges the widespread assumption that post-World War II representations of interracial coupling function primarily to index social conflict between black and white Americans. To counter this assertion, I select three black-authored novels that take up this theme and place them at the intersection of contemporary feminist and lesbian/gay critical discourse, as well as Whiteness Studies. My point is that some of these works are engaged with contesting historically bound, and essentialist, gender and sexual assumptions in ways that collide with and destabilize conventional understandings of such depictions. Historically, narratives of personal and unsocialized desire have presented a recurring problem to critics overly focused on racial oppression. Rather than looking to these works primarily as textual enactments of racialized demands by the black authors who produce them, I maintain that many of these novels are also passionately engaged with “bearing witness” to the cultural struggle of New World blacks and whites to arrive at a revised understanding of the historically variable linkages between sexual desire, political commitment, and racialized identity. The novels I have chosen are paradigmatic of this endeavor: Baldwin's Another Country (1962), Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her (1974), and Butler's Kindred (1979). In each novel interracial coupling plays a central role in African Americans' ongoing struggle to negotiate urban versus rural and/or Southern versus Northern sensibilities and values. Importantly, this struggle has both symbolic and personal effects. Up to now, scholars have privileged the former while subordinating the latter. In addition to the methodological approaches I have mentioned, my study also relies on revisionist social science research on black-white couples as a stigmatized minority group. Much of this work reverses previous critical interpretations that tended to view cross-racial desire as an inherently pathologized object-choice. By carefully attending to the historical moments in which these accounts were produced, my study avoids conflating the past with the present. In so doing, I uncover useful insights that help to situate racialized desire within a context of historical change and variation rather than stasis and fixity. |
