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A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities.
The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.
List of contents
Acknowledgements / Foreword, Lewis R. Gordon / Introduction: The Desiring Black Subject as Reading Method / Chapter 1: The Other Bites the Dust-Towards an Epistemology of Identity / And Beyond (Addendum)-The Death of the Same Others & The Discipline of Jouissance / Chapter 2: The Making of a Man-A Modernist Etiology of American Masculinities: Trauma, Testimony, Resistance / Chapter 3: Dying Metaphors and Deadly Fantasies-Freud, Baldwin, and the Meta-psychoanalysis of Race / Chapter 4: Desire as "E mag e nation"-South African Black Consciousness and Post-Identity in Rozena Maart's "No Rosa, No District Six" / Chapter 5: "The Substance of Things Hoped For"-Melvin Dixon's Vanishing Rooms; or Racism Intimately / Chapter 6: Writing as I Lay Dying-AIDS Literature and the H(a)unting of Blackness / Chapter 7: The Word's Image-Self-Portrait as a Conscious Lie Followed by: Motion, Perception and (Self-)Transformation-A Postdated Note / Selective Bibliography / Index
About the author
Jean-Paul Rocchi is Professor of American Literature and Culture at University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France.
Summary
This book explores how contemporary black literature challenges theoretical approaches of race, gender and sexualities.
