The term Black Venus most often conjures a racist label used to overwrite Black women’s humanity with stereotypical assumptions about their alleged primitive and overdeveloped sexuality. This is because studies of the Black Venus overwhelmingly focus on the figure’s most iconic iteration—Sarah Baartman. Billed as the Hottentot Venus, this South African woman was put on display in London and Paris as an exotic oddity for her ample posterior (1810-1815). She later became instrumental in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference designed to affirm the allegedly superior virtue of white women. The Black Venus has since become a potent icon of the material and symbolic violence of slavery and empire at the intersection of race and gender. Black feminist scholars and artists in particular use the Black Venus to expose the ongoing legacies of this violence and to repair it through projects of archival recovery. This dissertation argues that, in reducing her to a sexual stereotype, engagements with the Black Venus have overlooked more flexible and equally influential versions of the figure, both in her own moment as well as in her contemporary afterlives.Regardless of the historical period grounding their inquiry, interpretations of the Black Venus largely situate her within anachronistically rigid conceptions of racialized womanhood. However, in the eighteenth century, and even during Baartman’s lifetime, racial categories were still fairly fluid, and representations of the Black Venus throughout the Atlantic world were fraught with contradiction. She personified freakishness and exotic beauty, African atavism and savvy entrepreneurship, abject victimization and seductive power, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Black and white women. Focusing particularly on the racially ambiguous Black Venuses of the eighteenth century—Imoinda, Yarico, and the Sable Venus—I radically redefine the figure against her stereotypical function as a hypersexual foil to virtuous, white womanhood, and read her instead as an embodied contact zone between domestic intimacy and imperial commerce. I contend that, rather than reaffirming racial categories already in place, the Black Venuses of this period index the porousness between Black and white womanhood as an expression of the unprecedented scale on which commercial capitalism—with slavery at its center—was transforming the social fabric of English domestic life. Redrawing the contours of the Black Venus paradigm opens new ways of understanding her contemporary afterlives because it foregrounds how profoundly Atlantic societies past and present have filtered their experiences of capitalist modernity through the circulating cipher of Black womanhood. Tracing her appearances across a vast range of genres—including staged drama, ethnography, the periodical essay, poetry, visual culture, and parliamentary proceedings—I contend that the Black Venus’s persistence across three centuries has never been the result of her simple or static character. Instead, it reflects her capacious adaptability to diverse and even opposing ideological positions in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries: she has been marshalled to critique and excuse slavery, to celebrate commerce and warn of its perils, and, most recently, to recover the voices and humanity of Black women reduced to types in colonial archives, and to assert the impossibility of such recoveries. Upending established critical accounts of the Black Venus as a simple construct easily dismantled by a more enlightened present, I consider how different versions of the Black Venus layer onto one another to form a living record of the way histories of race, gender, commerce, and intimacy accumulate into the present, as well as the way that contemporary legacies of slavery and empire shape our engagements with the past.

“Queer Orientations” moves between the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism to show the shared strategies and tropes through which early-twentieth-century queer American writers articulated their queerness and oriented themselves in the world as queer. Working through the frames of diaspora, Orientalist fantasy, the struggle between individuality and community, camp aesthetics and the scrapbook roman a clef, these writers offer us a varied and compelling account of how queers navigated belonging and relation during a moment when same-sex desire was caught between medical and ethnic theories of identity and subjectivity. By putting black and white writers in dialogue— Claude McKay and Willa Cather, Richard Bruce Nugent and Edward Prime-Stevenson, Nella Larsen and Djuna Barnes, Wallace Thurman, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler—I demonstrate the centrality of race to queer identification and how race distinguishes encounters with shared tropes and representational strategies. McKay’s queer black diaspora offers an ephemeral utopia of transitory male community as a challenge to frameworks of diaspora grounded in the heterosexual family and the trauma of slavery. Cather’s fiction reveals how diasporic racial histories appealed to white queers estranged from their biological families and communities of origin. Nugent and Prime- Stevenson adapt Orientalist tropes to imagine a transnational, multiracial queer kinship and relocate themselves in alternate origin stories beyond the limited constructions of family and race. In their writing about same-sex female relationships, Larsen and Barnes strip the cosmopolitan gay male identity from the first two chapters of its utopian glamour to reveal how differences in desire and type simultaneously allure and disappoint the queer subject. Thurman, Ford and Tyler develop a queer aesthetic within the autobiographical novel to preserve the worlds they saw fading from view in the 1930s. Drawing together often separated movements and authors, I offer a reading of early twentieth century queer modernist literature that demonstrates the dynamic relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism. Across chapters, my research relocates the conceptual force of contemporary debates in queer studies about desire, race and belonging in an earlier historical moment, excavating this archive’s wrangling with queerness at a moment in history and tracing the echoes of that struggle across the twentieth century and into the present.

African literature itself tends to be framed monolithically. This tradition of bunching together representational literature of such a large and diverse place is not only reflective of an underlying imperialist gaze, but it also sets the stage for certain stories, landscapes, and even authors, to emerge as synecdoches for the entire continent. The downside of this phenomenon is that many of the spaces and stories that do not prove exceptional suffer a dearth of representation, and their distinctness thus goes unacknowledged and unappreciated. This dissertation explores how the institutional authorities on African literature have historically shaped the field using a barometer of spectacle and charisma, and how this institutional backdrop constructs and reinforces a spectrum of African landscapes, spaces, and stories that favors only the most exceptional objects. This project attends to those places on the African continent which fall in the middle of this spectrum and as such are less likely to find literary or scholarly representation in African texts. This project positions the medial territory between these poles to excavate the presence and function of an ever-present Western gaze in gatekeeping the field of African literature and scholarship. “Unwritten Spaces” intervenes first by narrowing the field a bit and focusing on a single and already richly diverse country, Nigeria.

My project broadens the generative and growing field of Middle Passage Studies by prioritizing and conceptualizing literary representations of womanhood alongside Atlantic enslavement through four highly acclaimed novels including Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988). All written by black female writers, they align themselves with, are compelled to or inspired by narratives of transatlantic slavery and imagine how Africas (as homelands, sites of origin, spaces of belonging, places of psychic freedom and physical mobility) are activated and performed throughout the diaspora. Every female protagonist across these works undergoes processes of purging and catharsis through modalities of crossing, fight, and flight dependent on their individual moment of rupture, embodiment or becoming. I contend that these meditations and mediations of brutal migratory movements trace social conditions, centuries old yearnings, melancholy and mourning of returning home or to mother-like lands—unmarked places on a map in the American South, remote islands and enclaves, international locales or imaginary places completely outside the realm of geography and the Americas. By staging an encounter between fictional black post-emancipation subjects, the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas, I construct a triangular cartography of cultural exchange centering black female transatlantic literature as integral to the small, generative and emerging corpus of Middle Passage Studies. Within all four diasporic novels, is the belief that there exists a place in the world that is free of racism, colorism, classism, sexism, and capitalism that maps a new world within the imagination and has the power to transform individual realities whether on land, in the air or at sea.

“Revolutionary Futures” examines the revolutionary unconscious of American literature. While revolution shapes American national identity, it also threatens that identity as evidenced by American support for oppressive regimes such as Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship in the Philippines. Despite this fraught relationship, there is, I contend, a persistent preoccupation with revolution in its literature. This unease reveals itself through genre, itself productive of futurity and national imaginaries in the prose of authors as varied as Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, Jessica Hagedorn, and Junot D?az. This dissertation rethinks heterosexual romance as the paradigmatic frame for the nation by drawing upon recent queer theory to investigate how failures of romance offer new models of kinship. By resisting the prevailing understanding of romance as allegory, my project untangles more complicated, unsettled ways of imagining the future. The authors I consider create new models for political futures that do not rely on teleological conceptions of time, but, instead, are open-ended and generate new forms of historicity. With such innovative kinship models driving conceptions of the future, each novel posits a different national imaginary that reconsiders the relationship between kinship and the state. By analyzing revolutions that engage with the history of Spanish colonization and American intervention, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Filipino People Power Revolution (1986), and the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo (1930-1961), I track how these revolutions are central to American literature, and prove the distinction between center and periphery to be illusory. In this way, my dissertation brings together literary criticism, critical race theory, and queer studies. More specifically, it reshapes how transnationalism and hemispheric studies conceptualize American literature by building upon earlier work on majority and minority literatures as well as multiculturalism.

This dissertation examines how twenty-first-century postcolonial fictions remake the liberal language of human rights to contest economic violence. A moral lingua franca for narrating violence and redress, human rights discourse typically deploys individual stories of suffering to evoke readerly empathy and galvanize ethical action. But its focus on the state as exclusive perpetrator and the self-possessed individual as the standard of personhood means it habitually misses economic violence—the structural denial from racialized subjects of rights to housing, healthcare, employment, education, food, and other tenets of material citizenship. By contrast, I argue that a growing group of contemporary postcolonial fictions—which I name “social rights novels”—helps us to rethink the relationship between human rights and economic violence. Included in this group are works by NoViolet Bulawayo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Imbolo Mbue, Ishmael Beah, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Jonathan Escoffery, Marlon James, and Edwidge Danticat. The genre exposes economic violence as a product of global racial capitalism and ongoing financial colonialism. It identifies and contests forms of predation overlooked by the dominant, rights-based imaginary—from the pollution and dispossession of Niger Delta communities by multinational oil companies, to the redirection of Caribbean state wealth toward international debt service and away from social welfare programming, to the marginalization of the economic refugee struggling to survive in the Global North. What holds the genre together across these diverse narrative sites is how it both marshals and destabilizes the language of human rights. To make this language usable, the social rights novel stretches it to a breaking point—something that postcolonial fiction has long done with colonial cultural materials. By breaking and remaking human rights in this way, the social rights novel builds a new narrative framework for imagining economic justice. Specifically, these works challenge the logic of neoliberal austerity, under which material provision is not a matter of rights but a market prerogative, a personal responsibility, or a problem for humanitarian charity.