Desiring Modes of Being Black

Jean-Paul Rocchi is Professor of American Literature and Culture at University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée.

• Acknowledgements / Foreword, Lewis R. Gordon / Introduction: The Desiring Black Subject as Reading Method / Chapter 1: The Other Bites the Dust—Towards an Epistemology of Identity / And Beyond (Addendum)—The Death of the Same Others & The Discipline of Jouissance / Chapter 2: The Making of a Man—A Modernist Etiology of American Masculinities: Trauma, Testimony, Resistance / Chapter 3: Dying Metaphors and Deadly Fantasies—Freud, Baldwin, and the Meta-psychoanalysis of Race / Chapter 4: Desire as “E mag e nation”—South African Black Consciousness and Post-Identity in Rozena Maart’s “No Rosa, No District Six” / Chapter 5: “The Substance of Things Hoped For”—Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms; or Racism Intimately / Chapter 6: Writing as I Lay Dying—AIDS Literature and the H(a)unting of Blackness / Chapter 7: The Word’s Image—Self-Portrait as a Conscious Lie Followed by: Motion, Perception and (Self-)Transformation—A Postdated Note / Selective Bibliography / Index

The Desiring Modes of Being Black is an archeology of desire and blackness. Rocchi pronounces a method of un-writing identity in texts only to interrogate its absences. The welcomed transdisciplinary approach exposes a critical, nuanced re-thinking of Baldwin, Dubois, race, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and others to advance a comprehensive frame to engage with performing blackness. Rocchi’s arguments are enhanced by his thoughtful and incisive writing, which makes the text desirable.