This chapter seeks to trouble the understanding of how the category of the “human” is articulated in the theory and literature concerning race. It asks how one might view the category of the “human” differently when the focus is shifted from Blackness to Indigeneity. Departing from the premise that Black studies recurringly examines the question of which bodies are assigned a fully human status in a white-dominated society, the chapter posits that Indigenous studies and literatures interrogating the category of the “human” oftentimes ask a question that moves beyond dehumanization: namely, how the human is constructed or constituted in relation to other forms of life, other-than-human or more-than-human, including the land itself. Beyond literary articulation and theoretical interest, this question also has political import as it works to shift the parameters of what is thinkable as politics under the auspices of settler colonialism, as this chapter shows through the analysis of present-day Indigenous poetry by Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).

Kerouac referred to the Black American as “the essential American” and “the salvation of America,” phrases that, while never adequately explored in Kerouac’s writing, signal at least recognition of the centrality of Black Americans and Black American culture to the broader American society. This chapter explores how consumption of Black culture and Blackness as a catalytic theme weaves throughout Kerouac’s work and is key to his broader aesthetic philosophy. However, this chapter argues that his often superficial readings ignore the reality of Black constraint, subsequently rendering Black life discrepant with the lived experience of Blackness in America. Problematically, his longing is ultimately predicated on Black silence and evasion of Black interiority, and any identification with Blacks is transitory and does not ameliorate his uses of Blackness.

This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

“Animalia Americana” foregrounds an examination and critical analysis of the historical, literary, and theoretical correlations between Blackness and animality to assess how these correlations, specifically the ways in which animals are found “running free” within a Black literature, might guide us toward more ethical practices. This chapter reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha as illuminating the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced. From the ways in which K-9 police dogs were unleashed upon Black people during the Civil Rights Movement as a violent form of sociopolitical suppression to the significance of animals in Black communal and familial units emblematized through the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and DMX’s love for his American pitbull terrier, this chapter complicates the relationship between Blackness, animality, and humanity.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

Historians and critics assume that the topic of ‘Britain’ and Camden’s Britannia only became political in 1603. But Camden’s Britannia (1586) was political in its very conception. Camden deliberately set out to undermine George Buchanan’s innovative 1582 account of Britain’s three ancient, Gaulish-speaking indigenous races (Britons, Picts and Scots). Camden wants only one indigenous race: Britons. So he conflates Picts and Britons as ‘painted people’, excluding Scots. Ben Jonson, Camden’s pupil, transformed this identification of British indigeneity with painted skin in the The Masque of Blackness, where Britannia becomes an island ‘discovered’ by the daughters of Niger as they seek to become ‘fair’. Inverting the poetry of Claudian, for whom sunburnt Africans and painted Britons mark the extremes of a vast Roman empire, Jonson sets Britannia at the centre of a new sea-empire, integrating the races of Britain by producing them as unpainted and therefore ‘white’. As unpainted indigenous whiteness replaces Camden’s painted indigeneity, what is left is ‘blackness’, the unwashable hue of the peoples beyond the British seas.

This chapter assesses a pivotal moment in the formation of racial stereotypes in comics in the 1890s and 1900s, when racialized caricature became a foundational element of newspaper comics in the United States. Combining theoretical reflections on stereotypes and on the stereotypical structures of comics, the chapter offers exemplary analyses of E.W. Kemble’s, Richard F. Outcault’s, Rudolph Dirks’s, and Winsor McCay’s ongoing investments in what I call racialines: the broadly entertaining and increasingly popular confluence of the drawn line and the blackened spaces it encapsulates in the graphic rendition of stereotypical “blackness.” The chapter argues that these often conflicted investments in racist visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century facilitated the emergence of new visions of “blackness,” giving rise to a print world of stereotypical depiction where comics offered a playing field for the racialized visual imagination and taught Americans to indulge in images and narratives of “race” in ways that habitually solidified yet also, at times, irritated more conventional notions of normative “whiteness.”

“Somatic Similarity: The White Other in Titus Andronicus,” uses Shakespeare’s first tragedy to expose the presence of the intraracial color-line. My book begins with this tragedy because it is the Shakespeare play that most efficiently showcases the white/white other binary produced by the intraracial color-line. This particular iteration of the color-line aligns and separates the play’s white characters along spiritual and moral lines. I use Titus pedagogically to guide the reader’s understanding of my book’s driving theoretical apparatus—the intraracial color-line—so they can then apply that concept in subsequent chapters and beyond the plays analyzed in my book. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is replete with appearances of the white other, as I suggest in the Introduction and at other moments. This gateway chapter challenges the easy assumption that one needs somatic Blackness in order to discuss race, or in order for race to be happening.

In July 2020, while most of the world was in lockdown amid the global Covid pandemic, a documentary aired on television in France called “The Hidden Children of Colonial France.” It featured recent interviews with elderly men and women from the Ivory Coast, who claimed the right to French nationality on the grounds that they were métis and their biological fathers had hailed from metropolitan France.1 They had all been born before 1960, when the Ivory Coast was a colony of France, and at the time of the documentary they were members of the Association of the Foyer of Métis in the city of Bingerville, located just outside of the capitol of Abidjan.

How did blackness and whiteness figure in the patterns of life and represenation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical empire? Performances of blackface characters in colonial environments – in this case of Mungo, the enslaved Black Servant in the comic opera The Padlock – could take the lead in parsing, categorizing and enacting typologies of "darker-skinned" peoples with lasting effects – an embodied form of racial "knowledge" that undergirded the subordination of non-British peoples in the construction of a global laboring class.