This dissertation argues that black sexuality is structurally nonnormative a priori, not contingently upon infraction. Due to the kinlessness of slavery, the violence of lynch sexuality, and the pathologization of the black family, black sexuality does not operate under the temporal model of normativity described by queer theory. Drawing on contemporary black critical theory and theories of slavery, my project places the normativity of civil society in the context of the constitutive exclusion of black political ontology, and stages the encounter between these conversations in works of contemporary African American literature.

“The White Man’s Magic Word: Southern Knowledge and White Racial Melancholy” re-evaluates the uses to which the memory of slavery is put in white-authored modernist literature. In chapters on Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I develop a literary history of white liberal racial attitudes that continue to define the racial discourse of the present. Through these readings, I develop a theory of white racial melancholy: a condition of personally painful and politically paralyzing attachment to intellectual concepts the white subject feels to be corrupted by white supremacy, but without which they cannot imagine either politics or literature.