Chapter 15 - Black Queer Life Writing

Summary

This chapter investigates the literary practices by which twentieth-century Black queer writers have simultaneously utilized, challenged, and modified the generic conventions of autobiography. They do so, Abdur-Rahman argues, to articulate nonnormative pleasures and collective politics that are not readily conveyed by standard autobiographical writing. Because autobiography typically follows the trajectory of a linear narrative of progress, conventional autobiographies capture neither the complicated histories of African diasporic subjects nor the quotidian experiences and social conditions that shape collective Black life and politics. Queer autobiographies typically take the form of the coming-out narrative, which emphasizes the primacy of sexuality over other components of personal identity and other forms of (communal) becoming and belonging. Abdur-Rahman deploys recent reconfigurations of sexual disclosure from "coming out to inviting in" to argue that Black queer life writing redefines the domains around which sexual identities are believed to cohere.