A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality

Abstract

A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality is a multi-genre, intragenerational, comparative study between the 1980/90s black gay anthologies In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986) and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1992) and the black gay male artistic production of the 21st century. The study focuses on affect, or feelings, and how black gay male authors deploy specific feelings methodologically that in the process develops a black gay understanding of feelings that rivals the affective turn. Chapter 1 begins by placing the anthologies within the tradition of the genre. Anthologies serve a particular function for minoritized groups: identifying the oppressions a group faces, establishing a group identity, and asserting a political or social agenda. The black gay anthologies of the 1980s/90s, which cite the writing by black women as their inspiration, follow that arc through their use of section headers and the texts that they contain, choices that highlight specific feelings. I closely read the section headers alongside a few exemplary texts from each anthology to theorize the feelings that section emphasizes. Loneliness, desire, and hope become my projects primary affective concerns. Loneliness functions as a social imposition on othered identities and develops as a weight, something to rid oneself of to be in community with others. Desire appears as the flourishing of sociality through friendships and romance; however, it is often interrupted by phenomena as varying as racial discrimination, health precarity, and loss. Hope, the final feeling, is about futurity, a cautious yearning for something beyond the present. The anthological generation demonstrates hope’s significance by writing on and through the AIDS epidemic. Contemporary writers respond to the affective foci of the anthologies and the rest of the dissertation tracks those responses. These writers take up the same feelings and either extend the theorizations found in the anthologies or undermine them towards a different end. In addition, by grounding my project in the anthologies of the 1980s and 90s, I extend the category of “black gay”, acknowledging the way that its usage consistently gestured towards the communal adhesion of black gender and sexual minorities, even if in its time, that gesturing was not always consummated. With that history in mind, my project reparatively centers the work of black trans and nonbinary writers within black gay. Chapter 2 considers Samuel Delaney’s Dark Reflections (2007) and Michael R. Jackson’s play A Strange Loop (2016) alongside the poetry of Cameron-Awkward Rich and theories of black transness to query the productivity found in purposefully residing in loneliness, a choice that presents a different relation to the social. Chapter 3 explores neo-slave narratives and mines the theoretical challenges texts like The Prophets (2021) and Insurrection: Holding History (1999) make with respect to theories of affect that regulate black feelings to the realm of the unthinkable through their centering of desire. And finally chapter 4 situates hope within the midst of discourses of afro-pessimism/optimism as well as the anti-relational turn in queer theory to consider how writers like Danez Smith in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) and Jordan E. Cooper in Ain’t No Mo’ (2023) reconsider the feeling as an aesthetic through their focus on HIV/AIDS and black queer isolation. While centering black queer theory and writing alongside affect studies, A Black Gay Sensibility joins a cohort of scholarship that highlights the extent to which black feelings are rendered marginal or ignored by white structure most notably by way of Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Jenifer Nash, Tyrone Palmer, and William H. Mosely III. This lack of attention overlooks the way that black queer scholars and writers have theorized affect before and alongside the affective turn within queer studies. Thus, this project theorizes black queer feelings over a range of texts.