Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Against the Closet: Racial Identity and the Bodily Basis/Biases of Sexual Identity  1

1. "The Strangest Freaks of Despotism": Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives  25

2. Iconographies of Gang-Rape: Or, Black Enfranchisement, White Disavowel, and the (Homo)erotics of Lynching  51

3. Desire and Treason in Mid-Twentieth-Century Political Protest Fiction  82

4. Recovering the Little Black Girl: Incest and Black American Textuality  114

Conclusion. In Memorium: Michael Jackson, 1958–2009  151

Notes  157

Works Cited  181

Index  193

“Against the Closet will benefit professors and ambitious undergraduate
and graduate students of African American literature. With consistent theoretical acumen, Abdur-Rahman’s last three chapters likewise undermine dominant notions of modernity, normalcy, and belonging.”—Regis Mann, Journal of American Studies

“Against the Closet will benefit professors and ambitious undergraduate
and graduate students of African American literature. With consistent theoretical acumen, Abdur-Rahman’s last three chapters likewise undermine dominant notions of modernity, normalcy, and belonging.”—Regis Mann, Journal of American Studies

"Against the Closet is an important and much-needed book, a significant contribution to African American literature, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's close readings of fictional representations of race and sex are nuanced and illuminating, and the history of racial thought and sexual science that she presents is indispensable."—Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995

"In this significant and timely text, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman complicates and expands our understanding of the queerness of blackness, making a welcome contribution to black cultural studies, black queer studies, literary studies, and work on lynching and the making of post-slavery whiteness."—Christina Sharpe, author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

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