Overview

A major intervention in the fields of critical race theory, black feminism, and queer theory, The Erotic Life of Racism contends that theoretical and political analyses of race have largely failed to understand and describe the profound ordinariness of racism and the ways that it operates as a quotidian practice. If racism has an everyday life, how does it remain so powerful and yet mask its very presence? To answer this question, Sharon Patricia Holland moves into the territory of the erotic, understanding racism's practice as constitutive to the practice of racial being and erotic choice.Reemphasizing the black/white binary, Holland reinvigorates critical engagement with race and racism. She argues that only by bringing critical race theory, queer theory, and black feminist thought into conversation with each other can we fully envision the relationship between racism and the personal and political dimensions of our desire. The Erotic Life of Racism provocatively redirects our attention to a desire no longer independent of racism but rather embedded within it.

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9780822351955

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Reviews

Sharon Patricia Holland's brilliant, provocative study challenges cultural theory by galvanizing a bold new conversation about the too-familiar realities of racism as manifested through everyday 'erotic' attachments, capaciously defined. As the book pointedly tracks the personal, bodily, familial, generational, institutional, and symbolic vectors of desire as implicated in racist ways of being, it brings into refocus a range of concerns--biology, touch, hate and love speech, blood relations, the forbidden, violence, miscegenation, liberal guilt and blame--that powerfully address the persistent pull of racism's ordinariness in a culture that ostensibly desires to move beyond race. This is next-wave feminism, queer studies, and race theory at its best. --Marlon B. Ross, author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Sharon Patricia Holland's brilliant, provocative study challenges cultural theory by galvanizing a bold new conversation about the too-familiar realities of racism as manifested through everyday 'erotic' attachments, capaciously defined. As the book pointedly tracks the personal, bodily, familial, generational, institutional, and symbolic vectors of desire as implicated in racist ways of being, it brings into refocus a range of concerns - biology, touch, hate and love speech, blood relations, the forbidden, violence, miscegenation, liberal guilt and blame - that powerfully address the persistent pull of racism's ordinariness in a culture that ostensibly desires to move beyond race. This is next-wave feminism, queer studies, and race theory at its best. Marlon B. Ross, author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era In The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Patricia Holland investigates the relation between the erotic and race in cultural theory. The objective of the book is both to counter the prevalent 'post racial' ethos of contemporary American society by showing the continued relevance of the black/white binery, and to investigate various couplings and de-couplings of race and sexuality in the academy. - Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 36, Issue 2, 2013

Author Information

Sharon Patricia Holland is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity and the coeditor of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, both also published by Duke University Press.

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