Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Imagination
Darieck Scott
320 pages
July, 2010
ISBN: 9780814740941
Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black
Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the
present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in
martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been
inflicted with harm or humiliation.
Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by
foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation
and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni
Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection
asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is
the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-
through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through
which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in
relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-
intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of
black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity,
body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated
and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant
Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.
In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form
of counter–intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—
found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches
our understanding of the construction of black male identity.
http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=5311
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