Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2020
Abstract
Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed Holiday + Cane. This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, sex under necropolitics. This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is ungendered and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Journal of American Studies
First Page
926
Last Page
950
Recommended Citation
Kahan, B., & Kishi, M. (2020). Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment. Journal of American Studies, 54 (5), 926-950. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819000847