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In Against the Closet, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and demanding situations cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century during the 20th, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest well known theories of identification, pathology, nationwide belonging, and racial distinction in American tradition. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to precise ancient sessions, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes corresponding to sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of specific racial accidents and advised types of social fix and political redress from the time of slavery, via post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black energy activities, to the past due 20th century.

Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, severe race, and poststructuralist theories to endure on literary genres from slave narratives to technological know-how fiction. interpreting works via African American writers, together with Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she indicates how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African americans for person and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that these representations have been basic to the advance of African American different types of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.

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