Gender, Sexuality, and Race Amani Carson College

Dwight McBride’s critical essay, Straight Black Studies: On African American Studies, James Baldwin, and Black Queer Studies, is a key contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in literature. In his essay, McBride identifies the absence of the component of sexuality within the scope of African American studies that predated the work of James Baldwin. He similarly criticizes the predisposition of scholarship to portray the African American experience with simplicity. McBride theorizes that that complexity of sexuality represented in James Baldwin’s texts - paired with Baldwin being an openly homosexual, black writer - challenged the ‘dominant, respectable, sanitized narratives of the African American literary tradition and what it can include’[1], and thus paved way to new discourse regarding the complexity of the African American experience, with the inclusion of sexuality as a key element. McBride identifies James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni's Room as the initial text to challenge African American discourse, but further examples relating to the key ideas found in McBride’s essay - specifically the difficulty in reconciling homosexuality and blackness - can also be found in Baldwin's later novel, Another Country.

Another...