Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Existential Negro Going Black1 The Funny Father's Luck 2 Ralph Ellison's Blues 3 Alas Poor Jimmy Coming Back?4 Saint Huey 5 Queer Sweetback Conclusion: Deviant Desiring Notes Index About the Author

In bold and beautifully crafted close readings, Reid-Pharr challenges many of the structuring absences that have shaped the fields of African-American literary studies, queer studies, and American Studies. His provocative arguments about sexuality, race, and masculinity are unsettling, in the best sense of that word. - Siobhan B. Somerville,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Provocatively and often brilliantly, this book disturbs some of our most fundamental thinking about the role of choice, literary influence, collective identity, and the racial erotic in African American letters. Reid-Pharr engages these questionssometimes with the subtler edge of his wit and other times with the sharpness of cutting-edge theorybut always with an eye to re-orienting us as readers toward what it means to inhabit, or refuse, the skin of identity. - Marlon Ross,author of Manning the Race A deeply local and deeply ethical book and Reid-Pharr is willing to risk the misunderstanding in order to insist on the importance of black political agency. There is a refreshing honesty in the way Reid-Pharr directs his comments toward readers. (GC Advocate) Once You Go Black sustains head-on, constant, and enormously crucial, intellectual challenges to readers. These challenges do not simply require us to rethink a wealth of commonly accepted assumptions but demand that we re-conceptualize how we think about some basic constructs of American intellectual history. (Lambda Book Report)

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Existential Negro Going Black1 The Funny Father's Luck 2 Ralph Ellison's Blues 3 Alas Poor Jimmy Coming Back?4 Saint Huey 5 Queer Sweetback Conclusion: Deviant Desiring Notes Index About the Author

In bold and beautifully crafted close readings, Reid-Pharr challenges many of the structuring absences that have shaped the fields of African-American literary studies, queer studies, and American Studies. His provocative arguments about sexuality, race, and masculinity are unsettling, in the best sense of that word. - Siobhan B. Somerville,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Provocatively and often brilliantly, this book disturbs some of our most fundamental thinking about the role of choice, literary influence, collective identity, and the racial erotic in African American letters. Reid-Pharr engages these questionssometimes with the subtler edge of his wit and other times with the sharpness of cutting-edge theorybut always with an eye to re-orienting us as readers toward what it means to inhabit, or refuse, the skin of identity. - Marlon Ross,author of Manning the Race A deeply local and deeply ethical book and Reid-Pharr is willing to risk the misunderstanding in order to insist on the importance of black political agency. There is a refreshing honesty in the way Reid-Pharr directs his comments toward readers. (GC Advocate) Once You Go Black sustains head-on, constant, and enormously crucial, intellectual challenges to readers. These challenges do not simply require us to rethink a wealth of commonly accepted assumptions but demand that we re-conceptualize how we think about some basic constructs of American intellectual history. (Lambda Book Report)

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Existential Negro Going Black1 The Funny Father's Luck 2 Ralph Ellison's Blues 3 Alas Poor Jimmy Coming Back?4 Saint Huey 5 Queer Sweetback Conclusion: Deviant Desiring Notes Index About the Author

In bold and beautifully crafted close readings, Reid-Pharr challenges many of the structuring absences that have shaped the fields of African-American literary studies, queer studies, and American Studies. His provocative arguments about sexuality, race, and masculinity are unsettling, in the best sense of that word. - Siobhan B. Somerville,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Provocatively and often brilliantly, this book disturbs some of our most fundamental thinking about the role of choice, literary influence, collective identity, and the racial erotic in African American letters. Reid-Pharr engages these questionssometimes with the subtler edge of his wit and other times with the sharpness of cutting-edge theorybut always with an eye to re-orienting us as readers toward what it means to inhabit, or refuse, the skin of identity. - Marlon Ross,author of Manning the Race A deeply local and deeply ethical book and Reid-Pharr is willing to risk the misunderstanding in order to insist on the importance of black political agency. There is a refreshing honesty in the way Reid-Pharr directs his comments toward readers. (GC Advocate) Once You Go Black sustains head-on, constant, and enormously crucial, intellectual challenges to readers. These challenges do not simply require us to rethink a wealth of commonly accepted assumptions but demand that we re-conceptualize how we think about some basic constructs of American intellectual history. (Lambda Book Report)