African American writing until 1930

The African presence in the United States and the construction of American black identity has a history of being sexualized. From this perspective, writing about racialization has often meant writing about sexual relations. Increasingly, scholars have drawn attention not simply to the sexualization of the black body, but also to the historical construction of sexual desire in the writings of African Americans. This chapter explores the representation of same-sex desire as well as the emergence of transgressive ideas about sexuality in these writings. The goal here has less to do with identifying the work of same-sex-desiring artists; instead the focus is on highlighting creative and nonfictional works that contribute to sexuality studies and queer studies. People with same-sex desire created some, but not all, of the texts discussed here. In this chapter I consider African American writing and cultural expression from the antebellum period until 1930. There are actually three distinct eras contained in this historical range: the antebellum period, the postbellum/turn-of-the-century period, and the Harlem Renaissance. Critics rarely consider all three together. I attend to each separately to draw out the important historical events and artistic strategies that come to define each, while emphasizing salient historical continuities and resonances. This chapter outlines the significance of representations of nonnormative sexuality in African American expressive culture that become the context for late twentieth-century works by self-identified gay and lesbian artists.