Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the Literary Imagination (review)

For scholars interested in fresh approaches to the study of race, gender, and sexuality, Darieck Scott's brilliantly written Extravagant Abjection is mandatory. Scott provides an effective model to approach the cultural and historical relationships that firmly situate/ define/separate African American studies, queer studies, history, and literary theory as interdependent fields of study.

Extravagant Abjection argues that by historicizing the relationship between blackness and abjection we find not a history of shame, defeat, or humiliation that must be resisted, but instead, by embracing these histories, we are endowed with "counterintuitive power." Counterintuitive power reinterprets Black Power (and?) cultural nationalism through a lens of sexual freedom. Scott finds that in their efforts to resist white hegemony and to affirm black pride, leaders of the Black Power Movement utilized cultural nationalism that precluded sexual freedom. Counterintuitive power is, Scott writes, "that which is not-power according to the ego-dependent, ego-centric (and masculine and white) 'I' definitions we have of power" (23). Thus, counterintuitive Black Power at once encompasses racial, political, national, psychic, cultural, and sexual sovereignty from the hegemonic, imperial, and colonial West.

Scott's methodology demands that we see historical excavation and literature as necessary when studying both blackness and sexuality. As Scott writes in the introduction:

My aim here is not to seek the revelations of history but to emphasize that key component of the work of historical excavation that involves the construction of the past: that is, to work imaginatively with—and rework, and work over, and maybe, if we are lucky, work through—the material that history provides

(10).

Legitimizing himself as a historian is not Scott's goal. Scott is a literary theorist who employs historical method to demonstrate, especially in the Americas, how race and sexuality are mutually constitutive. "Examining queer blackness" Scott avers, provides "opportunities to consider how the history that produces blackness is a sexual history" (8). Here, Scott is in direct conversation with Kathryn Bond Stockton's Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets Queer (2006). In her text, Stockton treats blackness and sexuality as discrete categories of analysis and she links the two through debasement. Such a move, Scott asserts, assumes a historical difference between race and sexuality; and this assumption further establishes an exclusionary boundary between race and sexuality as ontological subject formations (16).

Scott's critical optic of analysis is the rape of black men in canonical twentieth-century African American literature. Throughout the text, Scott signals penetration not as a sign of weakness and passivity but as a source of power and agency. In chapter 1, "Fanon's Muscle: Black Power Revisited," Scott articulates the book's theoretical framework. By mining and juxtaposing Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) alongside Black Power rhetoric of cultural nationalism, Scott finds that black radical thought often champions ideas of freedom that resist the history of pain endured by enslaved blacks. The practice of forgetting is not ahistoric. Due to the social construction of blackness through a process that Fanon theorizes as "sociogenesis," blackness is psychologically internalized and racially demarcated as the social Other. In Scott's reading of Fanon's theory, sociogenesis is a "psychoanalytic and phenomenological rendering of the cultural construction of blackness" as humiliation and defeat (38). According to Scott, internalizing blackness as Other resulted in Fanon and Black Power leaders viewing defeat as "to be defeated" (72). This view robs Africans, African Americans and (post) Colonial suffering bodies of their agency and subtle strategies of resistance to colonial subjugation. Defeat, Scott insists, must be "worked with and worked through" if obtaining freedom is the goal for black radical intellectuals and current "inheritors" of the black experience.

In his efforts to work with and "through defeat," Scott deploys Fanon's metaphorical "muscle tension" to interpret how colonized subjects perform certain "powers in the midst of debility" (64). As Scott explains: "Muscle tension in Fanon is a state of death...