Black Outlaws

The Author: Carlyle Van Thompson is Professor of African American and American literature at Medgar Evers College (CUNY). He received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. His published works include The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination (2004) and Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture (2006), as well as numerous articles in professional journals and book reviews.

«Carlyle Van Thompson has done it again! An audacious literary and cultural critic willing to ask unflinching questions about the limits and liabilities of racialist logics, Thompson takes on four canonical African-American writers and their embattled Black male protagonists (Richard Wright’s Cross Damon, Chester Himes’ Charles Taylor, Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel Rawlins, and Ernest Gaines’ Jefferson) to thematize the traumatic implications of race-based marginalization. And he is the perfect guide for such an important journey through America’s psycho-racial landscape – bold, iconoclastic, confrontational, and unapologetic. Thompson carefully demonstrates the extent to which race-based vulnerabilities are fundamentally constituted by the naturalized realities of gendered differences and the seemingly effortless reproduction of legal and class hierarchies. If Du Bois famously framed a version of the Black American experience as a question of always being made to feel one’s status as a «problem», Thompson extends that insight by asking us to imagine such renderings of problematic blackness (of literally and figuratively «outlawed» black masculinities) as institutionalizing a definition of racial criminality that includes African Americans into the narrative of American life as a kind of constitutive exclusion. You’ve probably read all four of these authors before – many times. But you haven’t quite read them like this!» (John L. Jackson, Jr., author of ‘Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness’)