Episode Details

A conversation with Alvin Henry, who teaches in the Department of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he writes on African American literature and literary theory. He is the author of the 2020 book Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel, published by University of Minnesota Press and which we discuss in this podcast. The conversation explores how the frame of queer flesh, entangled with the question of blackness, changes how we read key aspects of African American literature - in particular, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. As well, we explore the implications of these re-readings for theorizing subjectivity and how the frame of Black queer flesh exposes our habitual appeal to the very forms of subjectivity that condition and sustain anti-blackness.