Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- (II) Framing New Visions
- 32 Through a Different Lens
- 33 Children’s Literature and the Construction of Contemporary Multicultures
- 34 Redefining the Boundaries
- 35 Prizing Otherness
- 36 Frontline Fictions
- 37 Reimagining Africa
- 38 Post-Secular Perspectives
- 39 Post-Ethnicity and the Politics of Positionality
- Select Bibliography
- Index
34 - Redefining the Boundaries
Black and Asian Queer Desire
from (II) - Framing New Visions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- (II) Framing New Visions
- 32 Through a Different Lens
- 33 Children’s Literature and the Construction of Contemporary Multicultures
- 34 Redefining the Boundaries
- 35 Prizing Otherness
- 36 Frontline Fictions
- 37 Reimagining Africa
- 38 Post-Secular Perspectives
- 39 Post-Ethnicity and the Politics of Positionality
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Little is commonly said about sexuality in black and Asian British creative production, although diverse and often contradictory expressions of non-normative desire are easily traced throughout the twentieth century in the writing of, among others, McKay, Dawes, and Naipaul as well as Kureishi, Smartt, and Agbabi. Ranging across various literary forms to look at writers such as Kei Miller, Bernadine Evaristo, Diriye Osman, Neel Mukherjee, Thomas Glave, Jay Bernard, and Adam Lowe, this chapter raises questions about the interrogation, blurring, and translation of racial and sexual identities across a range of orientations and generations. It examines how texts have redefined and questioned the powerful stereotypes surrounding representations of black and Asian bodies, sexualities, and gendered identities. In so doing, it charts the uneven evolution and heterogeneous quality of queer black writing, framing it against Stuart Hall’s ‘refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always “right on”’.
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- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing , pp. 569 - 583Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020