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3 results

  • 9 - Like a Prayer

  • from Part II - Readings in Early America
  • Edited by Bryce Traister
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
    Published online:
    18 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021, pp 148-162

  • Summary

    How might a close reading of the language of revolutionary-era anti-slavery petitions contribute to a broader understanding of the politics of the American founding? This chapter focuses on one of the earliest surviving examples of African American political writing, the petition submitted to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 1773, by an author named FELIX. Revolutionary republicans came to disparage the petitionary form, because it had failed to persuade King George to defend his colonial subjects. The petition’s conventional language of deference and its tendency to “pray” or plead rather than to demand or insist led many colonists to reject the form in favor of far more assertive declarations of individual and collective right. By reanimating the petition, however, African Americans like FELIX not only contributed to the work of anti-slavery agitation; they also, as this chapter suggests, registered resistance to some of the dominant political ideas of the republican revolution. Drawing on historical studies of the significance of the petition in the colonies as well as accounts of the petition’s key formal and rhetorical features, this chapter makes the case for a specifically African American contribution to the political discourse of the founding.

  • 35 - Autobiography

  • from Part VI - Genres of the Present
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 643-659

  • Summary

    This chapter combines black sexual minorities to the history of African American and African diasporic writing. The longing between men that presumably structures much within modern art and culture is not mediated by a female cipher. Instead, as Huey Newton suggests himself, the extreme pressure that attends African and African American subjectivity tends to obviate the need to deny the key role that the queer subject must necessarily play in the production and reproduction of culture. Following the lead of lesbian writers, black gay men began in the 1980s to produce small literary magazines that provided room for emerging artists to experiment and develop their craft. Most important of all was the anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. This ambitious work had a number of key accomplishments. The anthology helped to articulate a long tradition of black gay writing that extended from the Harlem Renaissance to the tail end of the twentieth century.

  • 21 - Modernist Poetry

  • from Part IV - Queer Modernisms
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 378-401

  • Summary

    The African presence in the United States and the construction of American black identity has a history of being sexualized. From this perspective, writing about racialization has often meant writing about sexual relations. Increasingly, scholars have drawn attention not simply to the sexualization of the black body, but also to the historical construction of sexual desire in the writings of African Americans. This chapter explores the representation of same-sex desire as well as the emergence of transgressive ideas about sexuality in these writings. It considers African American writing and cultural expression from the antebellum period until 1930. The chapter outlines the significance of representations of nonnormative sexuality in African American expressive culture that become the context for late twentieth-century works by self-identified gay and lesbian artists. Critical treatments have consistently shown that the logic of enslavement was perverse not simply in the abuse and misuses of power but in the sexual dynamics it encouraged and even required.