Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (review)

We all know well the time-honored, clichéd riddle about what happens when you assume: you make an ass out of you and me. Roderick A. Ferguson's Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique asks a decidedly nonclichéd version of that question by querying and critiquing "canonical sociology's" assumptions about African American culture. Aberrations in Black may be a little book (as one reviewer commented), but it has very big ambitions. And its arrival onto the intellectual scene could not be more timely. In the words of reviewer Judith Halberstam:

The clarity of Ferguson's vision makes his narrative about how the histories of race and sexuality have come undone seem obvious, and, indeed, this is one of those books that leave you wondering how you could ever have thought otherwise about the topics at hand. Yet the clarity is due only to Ferguson's generous way of bringing his reader along through a difficult argument; his book actually tells an immensely complex story about how both liberalism and historical materialism have posited gender and sexual normativity as crucial to social transformation.¹

Aberrations is a text with which serious students of black sociology will inevitably have to contend. Though African American literary critics have largely eschewed (and with good reason) the relevance of sociological approaches to African American literature, Ferguson's text also recasts this historically vexed relationship between sociology and African American literary criticism for our reconsideration. And finally, Aberrations further excavates and clarifies a part of the useable past for the still emergent field of black queer studies.

Ferguson argues that one of the principal assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of sexual difference in the process of pathologizing black culture. A discursive operation at heart, Ferguson's text goes to great lengths to provide us with a genealogy of this foundational problem in canonical sociology, demonstrated most dramatically by the famed Chicago School of the 1930s. He spends a good deal of the book's preface and introduction establishing the stakes involved and identifying the historical imbrication of discourses that must be disarticulated in a "queer of color analysis." The book's opening gambit moves with impressive sweep and clarity through a number of knowledge canons demonstrating how, in the words of reviewer Arthur L. Little, Jr., a "queer of color analysis" "poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism and 'opts instead for an understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict' the idealization of capital and the liberal nation-state."²

Ferguson's readings of literary texts in the book are not always completely convincing, as Little rightly suggests. But whatever they may lack is more than compensated for in Ferguson's frontal assault on the problematic history of canonical sociology's purposeful relegation of black culture to the margins of society as largely irrecoverable to the established and proper heterosexist and patriarchal norms of the nation-state. This critique represents one of the book's major contributions with which scholars will be reckoning for some time to come.

Ferguson is perhaps at his greatest power as a literary critic in his reading of the unpublished chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in chapter 2 of Aberrations, "The Specter of Woodridge: Canonical Formations and the Anticanonical in Invisible Man." His recovery of the queer character of Woodridge, excised from Invisible Man's final published version, masterfully demonstrates how the queer of color resists interpellation into these regulated categories of African American identity established by both canonical sociology and dominant literary representations. Through the character of Woodridge, Ferguson argues that Ellison is suggesting that "the queer of...