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Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualised within contemporary thought. Markers of identity are too often isolated and presented as definitive, then examined and theorised, a process that further naturalises their absoluteness; thus socially generated constructs become socialising categories that assume coercive power. The resulting set of oppositions isolate and delimit: male or female, black or white, straight or gay. A new kind of intervention is needed, an intervention that recognises the validity of the researcher{u2019}s own self-reflexivity. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, the collection examines the frameworks and practices that deny transgressive possibilities. It seeks to engage in a consciousness raising exercise that documents the damaging nature of assigned social positions and either/or identity constructions. It seeks to progress beyond the socially prescribed categories of race, gender and sex, recognising the need to combine intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity, abstraction and emotion, consciousness and desire. It seeks to develop new types of transdisciplinary frameworks where subjective and political spaces can be universalized while remaining particular, leaving texts open so that identity remains imagined, plural, and continuously shifting. Such an approach restores the complexity of what it means to be human Introduction : theorizing for change : intersections, transdisciplinarity, and Black lived experience /Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi --Exordium : writing the relation : from textual coloniality to South African Black consciousness /Rozena Maart --Postcolonial backlash and being proper : femininity, Blackness, sexuality, and transgender in the public eye /Antje Schuhmann --Productive investments : masculinities and economies in Fisher's The walls of Jericho /Eva Boesenberg --"I hugged myself" : first-person narration as an agential act in Octavia Butler's The evening and the morning and the night /Florian Bast --Benjamin Franklin's ethnic drag : notes on abolition, satire, and affect /Carsten Junker --"Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap" : Claude McKay's literary drag performance in Banana Bottom /Jarrett H. Brown --The souls of Black gay folk : the Black Arts Movement and Melvin Dixon's revision of Du Boisian double consciousness in Vanishing rooms /Charles Nero --"Risking sensuality" : Toni Morrison's erotics of writing /Claudine Raynaud --Cultures of melancholia : theorizing desire and the Black body /Laura Sarnelli --Richard Wright's poetics of Black being : metaphor, desire, and doing /Rebecka Rutledge Fisher --On the monstrous threat of reasoned Black desire /Lewis R. Gordon --Revising Jezebel politics : toward a new Black sexual ethic /Jennifer S. Leath --The challenge of Black feminist desire : abolish property /Sabine Broeck.
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