Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (2010)
āChallenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.
Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If weāre racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive powerāindeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, āpowerā assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.
In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counterāintuitive powerāas a resource for the political presentāfound at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.āĀ
Darieck ScottĀ is Assistant Professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of the novelsĀ Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor ofĀ Best Black Gay Erotica.
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