Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race by Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman (review)

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s book Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race offers a compelling and original look at the way sexual and racial identifications and representations have been mutually constitutive in American literature. Abdur-Rahman’s book “advances a new architecture of race in which race operates as erotics” while also advancing a tropology of “transgressive sexuality … [challenging] popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture” (3). Finding good company with recent black queer studies texts like Sharon P. Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism (2012) and Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection (2010), Against the Closet embraces an increasingly popular epistemology wherein blackness is often regarded as queer.

However, Abdur-Rahman’s book differs from other black queer studies texts in key ways: it does not claim to address “black” and “queer” identity values in equal measure, favoring African American literature as its point of inquiry; it offers a critical genealogy of queer racialisms rather than “simply historicizing” them (5); and, most conspicuously, Abdur-Rahman offers the word “queer” as a term synonymous with “transgressive “or “regressive” sexuality (14). Through methods drawn from “African-American studies, psychoanalysis, sociology, queer theory, and gender studies,” Against the Closet engages with four main areas of inquiry: African American slave narratives, gang rape and lynching, the role of desire in mid-twentieth-century political fiction, and the incest trope in narratives featuring young black girls. In each, Abdur-Rahman shows change over time in the tropologies she constructs, making her areas of inquiry and their linkages purposeful in understanding something like a history of black queer representation.

In her introduction—which is direct, but sometimes overly telegraphed—Abdur-Rahman places her work with works of African American critique that, through interdisciplinarity, focus on the power of abjection (157). Much like Robert Reid-Pharr’s Once You Go Black (2007), Against the Closet seeks to redefine the “agency and autonomy” of radical sexual acts and bodies (4). Abdur-Rahman, in a way consistent with a traditional mode of queer theory, locates the queer subject of her book in transgression, as well as in “social (and sometimes sexual) margins, throwing into crisis and into relief our most precious and pervasive ideations of the normative” (6). However, in much recent queer theory, queerness does not just operate as a negation or a revisionary catalyst, and sometimes it even codifies dominance, so here one has to wonder if the evocation of queer discourse is somewhat instrumental. It is easier to value Abdur-Rahman’s suggestions about sexual difference’s visibility in the black corpus, an underexplored topic of queer studies (9). This gives a physical and spatial dimension to her analysis as she moves between the excess and absence of race and sexuality (19).

Chapter 1, “The Strangest Freaks of Despotism,” explores the way slavery as a system shaped “emergent models of sexual difference” in antebellum slave narratives, as well as in the white literary imagination (26). Through readings of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative—particularly Aunt Hester’s whipping—and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Abdur-Rahman draws a distinction between the intended effects of interracial sexual abuses as subjugating practices and their revision in Jacobs’s and Douglass’s books as galvanizing incidents of consciousness. Abdur-Rahman interprets transgressive sexuality in these two narratives as a rhetorical tool marking, especially for Jacobs, the perversity of slavery as an institution that destroyed families through pain and excess (50). What Rahman calls in her book queerness, although generative in certain ways for Jacobs and Douglass, was part-and-parcel of slavery’s barbarism.

Chapter 2, “Iconographies of Gang Rape,” explores the legacy of the miscegenation trope in reconstruction America juxtaposed with the rise of white supremacy, lynching, and gang rape. Abdur-Rahman notes that cross-racial intimacies “were so rigorously prohibited and policed in the post...