Article

"A love so fugitive and so complete":Recovering the Queer Subtext of Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows

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‘Sometimes things begin with the wrong book’: Images and Intertexts in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland

Chapter

Oct 2019

Gianna Zocco

Claude McKay's BATTLE

Article

Mar 2015

Terence Hoagwood

Gay Re-Readings of the Harlem Renaissance Poets

Article

Feb 1993

Gregory Woods

In the light of the long-established fact of their homosexuality or bisexuality, it is high time for the cluster of "Negro Renaissance" poets, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent, to be reappraised by and for gay readers. This paper seeks to develop gay reading strategies in relation to the poems of these writers, in order to reveal for contemporary readers likely subtexts which, at the time of their writing, were publicly read as bearing on race alone. It is often possible to read a particular poem as referring (in images such as that of the social outcast) to either racial or sexual oppression, interchangeably; and possibly, therefore, to both at once, by way of an implicit comparison. Likewise, poems on miscegenation can just as well be read, via the theme of forbidden love, as referring to homosexuality. The fact that most published critical readings deal only with the racial issue does not invalidate the likelihood that the poem can be, and indeed requires to be, read as referring, also, to sexuality. Gay readings emerge, then, not merely from these writers' representations of attractive men and boys, but also in the midst of their most famously anti-racist themes.

Article

Queer resolutions: 9/11 and Muslim masculinities in New York

July 2013 · South Asian Popular Culture

Deepti Misri

This article examines how the Bollywood film New York interrupts some of the dominant gendered and sexualized fictions about 9/11 in US public discourse and by extension, in Indian cinematic and popular discourse about Muslims and citizenship. As several transnational feminist scholars have observed, the monstrously deviant Muslim terrorist, and the heterosexual drama of nationalist domesticity ... [Show full abstract] were two key tropes circulated in media discourse following 9/11. My reading explores how New York takes on both these tropes as it works to reintegrate Muslim male subjectivities into the national imaginary. In New York, these dominant 9/11 fictions are worked into the central heterosexual love triangle, which is cinematically consolidated in the shadows of the twin towers, and then swiftly undone by 9/11. I focus on this erotic triangle in order to examine how, why, and to what effect the film provides an unusually ‘queer’ resolution to the love triangle, going against the anticipated heterosexual resolution most conventional to the formula. Can this be read a resolution that resists the incitement to heteronormativity that followed 9/11?

Article

P/Reparation: Barthes and Sedgwick

October 2016 · Romance Studies

François Proulx

This article highlights peculiar affinities between Roland Barthes’ last works, particularly his seminars on La Préparation du roman, and the later work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Barthes and Sedgwick reflect on attachments that exceed the boundaries of genealogical affiliation (both familial and intellectual); in turn, they foster similarly queer attachments in their readers. Both draw on the ... [Show full abstract] theories of Melanie Klein to reflect on love, mourning, fantasy, and their link to creativity differently, through an alternative to Freudian models of Oedipality and sublimation. The Kleinian concept of reparation, where powerlessness in the face of loss is lucidly acknowledged but simultaneously transformed into an impetus for creative work, infuses the later works of both critics. I observe that these parallel critical trajectories share a fantasized, avowedly fictional ‘mother’, who also worked in the shadow of loss: Marcel Proust.

Article

Vernon Lee: New Woman?

March 1992 · Women s Writing

Sondeep Kandola

This article tracks the evolution of the sexual and aesthetic politics of the late-Victorian critic, aesthetician and Renaissance historiographer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in response to the controversies generated by "the Aesthetic Movement" at the fin de siècle. Despite her own practice of same-sex love, Lee's first work of Renaissance historiography, Euphorion (1884), strikingly indicts the ... [Show full abstract] celebration of aesthetic hedonism, male homosociality, and aesthetic individualism which formed the conceptual underpinning to Walter Pater's seminal text of impressionist historiography, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). In this, Lee can be seen to anticipate the sanitising tenor of the New Woman's response to the Aesthetic Movement a decade later. The sequel to Euphorion, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), was published in the shadow of the Wilde trials and unexpectedly defers from participating in that backlash to radical literary culture marking both newspaper editorials and New Woman publications. Instead, a dextrous co-opting of New Woman discourse can be adduced from Lee's assertion that the radical philosophies of the Decadents would be harnessed for the purposes of social good. As this article reveals, Lee's brave insistence on a "queer comradeship" with the literary avant-garde at this pivotal moment in finde-siècle culture signals a distinct emboldening of her sexual politics.

Article

Vernon Lee: New Woman?

January 2005 · Women s Writing

Sondeep Kandola

This article tracks the evolution of the sexual and aesthetic politics of the late-Victorian critic, aesthetician and Renaissance historiographer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in response to the controversies generated by "the Aesthetic Movement" at the fin de siècle. Despite her own practice of same-sex love, Lee's first work of Renaissance historiography, Euphorion (1884), strikingly indicts the ... [Show full abstract] celebration of aesthetic hedonism, male homosociality, and aesthetic individualism which formed the conceptual underpinning to Walter Pater's seminal text of impressionist historiography, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). In this, Lee can be seen to anticipate the sanitising tenor of the New Woman's response to the Aesthetic Movement a decade later. The sequel to Euphorion, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), was published in the shadow of the Wilde trials and unexpectedly defers from participating in that backlash to radical literary culture marking both newspaper editorials and New Woman publications. Instead, a dextrous co-opting of New Woman discourse can be adduced from Lee's assertion that the radical philosophies of the Decadents would be harnessed for the purposes of social good. As this article reveals, Lee's brave insistence on a "queer comradeship" with the literary avant-garde at this pivotal moment in finde-siècle culture signals a distinct emboldening of her sexual politics.

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Clubs and Clubhouses

January 1971

Charles C. Baldwin

Interested in men and women, in the ways of the world, White wanted his buildings to be useful: to be beautiful, of course; gay if possible; but livable first, and comfortable, not austere memorials to his art1 nor trivial tiers of cells piled one upon another. He loved life; and he knew (as who doesn’t?) that a cottage where the seasons pass in a clamor of activity is better than an office ... [Show full abstract] building gathering dust and decay among the clouds. He knew that business is not a religion, that it cannot raise monuments to itself; that it is not more enduring than brass. Business is, in fact, never gracious, no matter how honorable it may be; and the average business man is—more often than not —objectionable,2 with his foolish insistence upon the respectability of avarice and greed. Skyscrapers may impress the stranger as hives of activity, pillars of progress and symbols of man’s humanity, of service to one’s fellows; but they depress those who must live in their far-leaning shadows. They are like jails where men and women condemned to earn an honest living go through their routine motions.