Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter
Unthinkable, Unprintable, Unspeakable: Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter-Grene A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Louis Chude-Sokei, Chair Eva Cherniavsky Sonnet Retman Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2014 Kirin Wachter-Grene University of Washington Abstract Unthinkable, Unprintable, Unspeakable: Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter-Grene Chair of Supervisory Committee: Professor Louis Chude-Sokei English This dissertation argues that African American literary representations of transgression, meaning boundary exploration, reveal a complex relationship between sex, desire, pleasure, race, gender, power, and subjectivity ignored or dismissed in advantageous yet constrained liberatory readings/framings. I trace transgression to confront the critical dismissal of, or lack of engagement with African American literature that does not “fit” ideologically constrained projects, such as the liberatory. The dissertation makes a unique methodological intervention into the fields of African American literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural history by applying black, queer writer and critic Samuel R. Delany’s conceptualizing of “the unspeakable” to the work of his African American contemporaries such as Iceberg Slim, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Hal Bennett, and Toni Morrison. Delany theorizes the unspeakable as forms of racial and sexual knowing excessive, or unintelligible, to frameworks such as the liberatory. The unspeakable is often represented in scenes of transgressive staged sex that articulate “dangerous” practices of relation, and, as such, is deprived of a political framework through which to be critically engaged. I argue that the unspeakable can be used as an analytic allowing critics to scrutinize how, and why, much postwar African American literature has been critically neglected or flattened.
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