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Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2019

BENJAMIN KAHAN  and
MADOKA KISHI
BENJAMIN KAHAN
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University. Email: [email protected], [email protected].
MADOKA KISHI
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University. Email: [email protected], [email protected].
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Abstract

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 926 - 950
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019

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