Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel by Alvin J. Henry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel by Alvin J. Henry Jacob Debrock Alvin J. Henry. Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel. U of Minnesota P, 2020. 1 + 258 pp. The fluid boundary between self and group, between I and we, is a concept many people find hard to grasp. How do people know when they are acting as an individual, with their own desires and ideologies, and when are they operating as part of a larger system with ideologies that may differ from their own? In literature, a response to this question is the bildungsroman, the narrative wherein the main character develops in order to participate in a white middle-class society, typically forcing themself to hide aspects of their identity that would be troubling to that society. As expected, this narrative form glosses over the issues and struggles of communities outside the white middle-class society and how this society demands that people of color become Western, white liberal humanist subjects, rather than embracing the fluidity of their identities. Is it possible for a narrative to exist wherein Black men and woman are able to throw off the shackles of subjectivity, to embrace the anxiety of their existence, and to become more whole selves? According to Alvin J. Henry’s Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel, throughout the twentieth century in African American literature, the narrative of self-abnegation, which denies the subjectivity that has been forced on Black people and accepts their radical queer possibilities, has examined different ways of rejecting or accepting the Bildung. Henry’s book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introduction, “Rejecting Subjectivity,” lays out Henry’s thoughts on how the process of Bildung is inherently racist and limits the possibilities for Black people to actively engage with their community and themselves. The first chapter looks at three early twentieth-century texts—Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (first published anonymously in 1912; republished in 1927) by James Weldon Johnson, Quicksand (1928) by Nella Larsen, and Plum Bun (1928) by Jessie Redmon Fauset—and examines how the protagonists of these novels begin a process of rejecting subjectivity before being thwarted by what Henry, following Jacques Lacan, calls “surplus jouissance” (8), or the overwhelming of oneself with positive energy so that the anxieties that result from anti-Black racism fade away. In the second chapter, focused on Larsen’s Passing, Henry illustrates how the novel’s Black queer aesthetic provides the first true example of rejecting the self; what might have previously been viewed as two women struggling to reconcile their racial identities is now about a woman forgoing the identities placed on her, instead allowing her identity to become part [End Page 795] of the greater Black queer flesh. The third chapter moves to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), dealing with both the published version and drafts that Henry found in Ellison’s archives. Examining the parts that Ellison removed from drafts, Henry uncovers the queer disabled version of Invisible Man that exists in fragments in the published novel and how Ellison creates a larger community of unselved people, which allows the protagonist to reject his self by the end of the novel. The penultimate chapter examines Richard Wright’s final novel, The Long Dream (1958), and the ways Wright uses the queer dynamics of his protagonist, Fishbelly, to consider how social protest and Civil Rights could be used as a method to forgo the self and completely escape from the anxieties of anti-Black racism. The fifth and final chapter returns to Invisible Man to examine the story of Jim Trueblood and how he constantly reinvents his identity and connections with his community, before ending with an analysis of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019), arguing that it completes the narrative of self-abnegation by utilizing the voices of a community rather than valuing one person over the whole. Henry’s ideas of Black queer flesh, that the concept of the liberal humanist subject must be rejected in order to better engage...