Toward a Decolonial Queer Humanism: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved and André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name

Abstract

Abstract: This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared by modernists and queer negativists that this alienation is universal and unavoidable, Hardy hints at how an aestheticized version racial memory can enable collective agency beyond Western individualism. André Aciman expresses this decolonial version of racial memory in Call Me by Your Name (2007), moving beyond the limitations of modernist queer negativity in his portrayal of desire between Jewish men.