Black Friday, Queer Atlantic

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9250489
AutoresRobinson O Murphy Robinson O Murphy, Robinson O Murphy (autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen49
Número2
Páginas182
Fecha de publicación2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
EditorialIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.49.2.11
OpenAlexW2900423745
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas12

This article details the political significance of Booker Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee queering a longstanding slave character trope. After briefly sketching how Shakespeare's Caliban and Daniel Defoe's Friday operate narratively, I demonstrate that Coetzee's Friday in Foe (1986), in contradistinction to his literary predecessors, refuses protocols attached to language, music, dance, and sex. That is, by disavowing all forms of intercourse with white heteropatriarchy, Coetzee's Friday averts his own erasure precisely by espousing a politics of castration. This castration—or refusal to be made intelligible and thereby appropriable to European interlocutors during the time of slavery—directs readerly scrutiny to the imperialist self-regard exemplified in Shakespeare's Prospero and Defoe's Crusoe. Distinct from the seeming critical consensus that dismisses Coetzee's Friday as "the castrated mute," I thus show that his castration produces a political alternative that commands recognition of the inconvenient, unsanitized history of the Atlantic

Queer · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · History · Race, History, and American Society