“A vibrant life force”: A Review Essay on Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel

“A vibrant life force”: A Review Essay on Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel David B. Green (bio) BLACK QUEER FLESH: Rejecting Subjectivity in The African American Novel. By Alvin J. Henry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2020. Throughout my reading of Alvin J. Henry’s Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in The African American Novel, I hummed the song, “Ima Read” by the Berlin-based, Jamaican born rapper Zebra Katz. “Ima Read” has a catchy and seductive two-step dance beat and the video-visual is produced with a haunting black-white medium reminiscent of classic horror films from the early twentieth century. Even more, the song’s lyrics dance with the profane as Zebra Katz constantly says that he is going to “read that bitch/ima school that bitch,” while repeating throughout the chorus, “Ima read/Ima read/Ima read.”1 Reading, then, constitutes the point of the song—and not just any reading. Here, Zebra Kats enacts a reading performative deeply rooted within the Black queer vernacular—a reading that slays, arrests, destabilizes, and checks the offender for their acts of aggression, if not violence.2 A reading, furthermore, that simultaneously throws—as the drag icon Dorian Corey reminds us in the documentary Paris is Burning—a little shade and reveal interpretive strategies crucial to examining the ways that Black queer drag queens fashioned and made meaning of their lives within and against a world that limited and reduced their existence to mere entertainment and violence. Thus, at [End Page 39] the intersection of the performance and practice of reading Zebra Katz, Dorian Corey, and Alvin J. Henry converge in their efforts to, as Zebra Katz sings, “give that bitch some knowledge.” If we readers are bothered by my prioritizing the profane, the in your face/ness of the b-word “bitch”—and instead desires a much more “civilized” or responsible, if not typical, way to write about/read/introduce/scholarship, and in this case Henry’s Black Queer Flesh, then we might want to rethink our complicity in the ways that we imagine subjectivity. Furthermore, given these concerns, we might want to deeply ponder our participation in liberal humanism—which, in simple terms, constitutes the project of expecting respectable self-making determined by white power brokers; and, in my case, expecting me to frame the introduction to this review in the typical fashion of academic writing. In Black Queer Flesh then, Henry advances a study of radical reading practices that asks us to rethink, and wholly reject, notions of subjectivity and liberal humanism. In our rejection of subjectivity, especially, Henry argues for a paradigmatic shift in the ways that we read for and examine meaning-making in African America Literature. Discovering Black queer flesh—the liberating and, indeed, “vibrant life force” (7) of black queer life often negated and denied in and beyond Black life—is the reward of our new, radical reading practices. To start with, Henry is not cursing anyone out throughout Black Queer Flesh. Though, he does challenge, and thus take issue with, the ways that despite their attempts to narrate the experiences of Black folkx in America, Black novelists have relied on formulations of agency, self-determination, and triumph to construct the subjectivity of their central and secondary Black characters. Agency, self-determination, and triumph—which here is read as defeating the economic odds of poverty expected of black people—co-constitute the subjectivities predetermined for Black characters. These predetermined subjectivities are wrought forth by Western literary aesthetics, and chiefly the Bildungsroman literary genre. The Bildungsroman (henceforth “Bildung”), limits, Henry argues, ways to examine self-making and knowledge production at the center of Black literary production. He insists that because of these limits, Black novelists not only struggle to expand representation, experiences, and the knowledge-making of Black characters within the African American novel, but that even the most astute readers of Black literature approach analysis of these novels with these narrow subjectivities in mind. Typical readings, then, lead to oversight into the ways that some of the most well-known Black characters develop strategies to cope with and not deny their experiences with anti-black racism and...