Black Gay Man: Essays - Softcover

Reid-Pharr, Robert F.; Delany, Samuel R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814775039 ISBN 13: 9780814775035

Publisher: NYU Press, 2001

Synopsis

The landmark book that established Robert Reid-Pharr as one of America's most exciting and challenging left intellectuals

At turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man spoils our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduced the eloquent voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism.

At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti-Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid-Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America.

About this title

About the Authors

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

Samuel R. Delany is a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includes Dhalgren (1975), Babel-17 (1966), The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007), and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). In addition to receiving the William Whitehead Memorial Award and the Kessler Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report in 1988 as one of the fifty most influential people of the past hundred years to change our conception of queerness. After more than thirty years of teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and later at Temple University, where he served as Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program, Samuel Delany now lives with his partner in Philadelphia.

Reviews

"If there is one thing that marks us as queer... it is undoubtedly our relationship to the body," writes Reid-Pharr in this startling and provocative collection of essays detailing his intellectual (and erotic) life as a black, gay man living in a racist, heterosexual, postmodern world. Covering a wide range of topics black anti-Semitism, the Million Man March, interracial sex, the black family, gay male identity and lesbianism Reid-Pharr presents a cogent analysis that combines the personal with the political, the intellectual with the emotional and the erotic. Several essays gracefully unite literary and social concerns as when he uses the works of Frantz Fanon, George Jackson's letters from prison and the poems of Phyllis Wheatley to explicate the political position of black women in the nuclear family. Meanwhile, Reid-Pharr can be equally insightful and poetic when describing the meanings of his own sexual adventures with white men. An associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins, he demonstrates his training in literature in lengthy discussions of such works as Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and the posthumously published poetry of Gary Fisher. But the vitality and importance of this collection resides in Reid-Pharr's ability to move these works and their themes from the limited analysis of the academy into a broader realm of lived experience and social context that makes them, as well as Reid-Pharr's own thoughts, vital and genuinely consequential. (July)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814775039
• ISBN 13: 9780814775035
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208