In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde theorizes the erotic as an innately political force with the capacity to yield profound fulfilment and understanding. A vehicle of social change, the erotic necessarily warrants surveillance within hierarchical terms of order. Yet, as Lorde reminds us, harnessing the erotic toward the development of critical consciousness destabilizes patriarchy, carving out a space for heretical possibilities. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman compellingly, if implicitly, expands upon Lorde's formulation in her comprehensive study of African American literary resistance from slavery through the post-Civil Rights era, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. While Abdur-Rahman explicitly cites the impact of black feminist scholarship by Ann duCille, Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, and Frances Smith Foster on her thinking, one might argue that Lorde's influence, too, is clear. “There is power in the erotic, and in sexual non-normativity, to narrate a world, or, more specifically, to narrate the world of particular marginalized, minoritarian subjects and to remake it,” Abdur-Rahman contends early on in the volume (2).

Extending Lorde's intervention, Abdur-Rahman analyzes African American intellectual production across genre – slave narrative, protest novels, science fiction – and its engagement with transgressive sexualities, specifically as a means to counter processes of black abjection. Concerned less with waging an ontological inquiry into the verity of same-gender erotic expression throughout history, Abdur-Rahman instead adopts an epistemological focus. How, for instance, do Pauline Hopkins, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler mobilize renderings of nonnormative love to contest institutions of heteronormativity and white privilege? From close readings of the pathologizing discourses of Sigmund Freud and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to refreshing interpretations of experts in cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race studies, including Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, and Hortense Spillers, Abdur-Rahman interrogates the interpenetration of race and sexuality within literary enterprises aspiring to black liberation.

From the outset, Abdur-Rahman consistently defamiliarizes what we think we know about African American history, literature, and resistance. Reversing conventional modes of periodization in chapter 1, she locates enslavement as a vestibular site for the development of ideologies of sexual difference typically associated with twentieth-century sociological discourse. In fact, readers are invited by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Abdur-Rahman asserts, to participate in processes of erotic fantasy and masochism. However, via graphic depictions of sexual deviance, antebellum rhetors unmask the system of slavery itself as the ultimate perversion. Abdur-Rahman's articulation of Douglass's oft-cited “blood-stained gate” not as whipping post, but as “a metaphorical image for female genitalia ravaged by violation and childbirth” (36); her attentiveness to the interracial, same-gender abuse of a bondman named Luke in Incidents; and her configuration of Mrs. Flint in the same text as “a sexual culprit in her own right” (46, original emphasis) especially shine. Critically addressing the ways in which nineteenth-century black activists appropriated “race as erotics” as a means of political redress, Abdur-Rahman's framework inspires a return to the sexual underpinnings of other neglected texts of the era, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave (1850) and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) among them.

Notably, 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. Juxtaposing, in the second chapter, William Faulkner's Light in August and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Abdur-Rahman reinvigorates understandings of mixed-raced characterization in post-Reconstruction fiction, further theorizing lynching as a nexus of desire and finally as an instantiation of gang rape. The emphasis on Hopkins's novel, in particular, facilitates a generative exploration of the complex relationship between lynching, rape, domesticity, and racial uplift.

Alternatively, the third chapter examines the tropological function of interracial sexual longing in the civil rights and black-power-era works of Ann Petry and James Baldwin. As the former elucidates the persistence of enslavement in shaping the potential for ethical citizenship and viable interracial intimacy, Baldwin's archive positions the figures of the black aesthete and gay male as agents of transformation, troubling the bounds of liberal sentimentalism and black nationalism alike. Turning in the concluding chapter to contemporary black women's writing as varied as The Bluest Eye, Corregidora, Imago, and Push, Abdur-Rahman addresses figurations of incest which challenge the devastating effects of civil rights retrenchment, urban poverty, and black patriarchy on black women and girls. Though Abdur-Rahman's project provokes broader questions regarding the methodological risks of absenting lived black queerness, her openness to the erotic as a powerful reservoir of subversion and critique truly resonates, affirming the prescience of Lorde's scholarship and an exciting trajectory for the future of African American studies.