GerShun Avilez

For an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.

This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Learn more about Black Queer Freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assessment of the incomplete nature of civil rights, even in the midst of historic legislative change, resonates with experiments in African American literary and performance culture of the 1960s.

Read "Vanishing Acts: Civil Rights Reform and Dramatic Inversion in Douglas T. Ward's Day of Absence."

Forthcoming June 2020

Newton s statement made one year after Stonewall and the same month Newton was released from prison takes the unorthodox step of suggesting the importance of black radical organizations and collectives.

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, he left Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem to take up the work Malcolm had begun. Rejecting his bohemian past, he committed himself to black nationalism and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre­School to radicalize the poor through art.

GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods.

What would it mean to “get over slavery”? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America?

The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies.

Avilez analyzes the suspenseful novel portraying a community–and a family–under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s.

Black Gay Genius looks back at the 1980s, but also looks forward, seeking to build upon the artistic and political legacy of black gay men’s from the 1980s.

Locations, he contends, simultaneously engage and transgress the social, architectural, and juridical meanings attributed to the areas that they occupy by means of the subversive bodies that collectively inhabit and pass through them. He goes on to characterize this concept in these terms: "queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape" (21, emphasis added).1 The term "queer space" is most often employed as a way to discuss and analyze the precarious positioning of gay, lesbian, and transgender social spaces and the politics of gentrification in regard to these locations.2 However, I believe that Désert's formulation reveals the potential of the lens of "queer space" to exceed its strictly geographical or architectural valence and provide a framework for theoretical and formal analysis within literary studies.

Hansberry takes on residential segregation by confronting that practice not merely as a restriction on domestic space but mainly as a constriction of civic identity. The case intimates that, given the centrality of segregation to restrictive practices affecting citizenship, the relationship of African Americans to places of residence and to domestic space in general is indicative of their relationship to legal structures. The social and legal developments that directly and indirectly encouraged segregated housing during the mid-twentieth century created the conditions for African Americans to feel estranged from their domestic spaces. (1) The feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction with the "kitchenette" expressed in Gwendolyn Brooks's poem define the housing problems to come for many African American communities, and such sentiments factor into representations of domestic space in mid-20th-century African American narratives.

“Whispering Sexuality: Queerness and the Limits of Black Satire” in Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama. Ed. Derek Maus and Kim Donahue (U of Mississippi P, forthcoming Fall 2023)

Fall 2019-Spring 2022