LITMIR.BIZ

Why hate Abercrombie? In a world rife with human cruelty and oppression, why waste your scorn on a popular clothing retailer? The rationale, Dwight A. McBride argues, lies in “the banality of evil,” or the quiet way discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into and reflect malevolent undertones in American culture.McBride maintains that issues of race and sexuality are often subtle and always messy, and his compelling new book does not offer simple answers. Instead, in a collection of essays about such diverse topics as biased marketing strategies, black gay media representations, the role of African American studies in higher education, gay personal ads, and pornography, he offers the evolving insights of one black gay male scholar. As adept at analyzing affirmative action as dissecting Queer Eye for the Straight Guy , McBride employs a range of academic, journalistic, and autobiographical writing styles. Each chapter speaks a version of the truth about black gay male life, African American studies, and the black community. Original and astute, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch is a powerful vision of a rapidly changing social landscape.

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Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Scholarsof US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations thatBlack Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslavedperson’s claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literalstarvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of theslaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacksexperienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. TheDelectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism,cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literatureand US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, suchas the slave narratives of OlaudahEquiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other lesscirculated materials like James L. Smith’s slave narrative, runaway slaveadvertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in thenineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, politicalaspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both Europeanand white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh.Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only againstsocial consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation andhunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of thecontroversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of thetwenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which todescribe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

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Even the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives «bear witness» to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to «tell the truth» about slavery? Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that places slavery at its center. Impossible Witnesses addresses some of the major literary figures and representations of slavery in light of discourses on natural rights and law, offers an account of Foucauldian discourse analysis as it applies to the problem of «bearing witness,» and analyzes specific narratives such as «Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,» and «The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.» A work of great depth and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders traditional interpretations of Romanticism impossible and places Dwight A. McBride at the forefront of studies in race and literature.

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