Taboo desires? : James Baldwin, African Americans, homo-eroticism and the frontiers of mind/place/race and sex

This essay charts a powerful triad of frontier/border crossings: the mobility of imagination, of places real and imagined and of sexual desires, obsessions and behaviours that criss-cross national boundaries, racial divides and notions of ‘normality’, that mobilize a transgressive and ‘secret’ self-made all the more potent by words like ‘taboo’. My mode of analysis is remembrance, a type of archaeology of the self/body that attempts to recall the power of these frontier/border crossings and the implications of such a narrative for our understanding of the complex ways imagination, desire, corporeal travel, racial cartographies and sexual behaviour are animated and performed in motion, where everything is improvised, fluid and lacking fixity (see Eguchi 2015). Only in retrospection is there a type of stasis, a pinning down in analysis, the illusion of solidity when, in fact, there was none at all. I have chosen a narrative mode because of its constant drive forward, its relentless movement, its fusion of action and time, its ability to reshape time and place, its focus on character and its first-person capacities. But I also employ narration with extreme caution because of its often inbuilt teleology, its plot determination and its urge for resolution. These aspects of narrative will be eschewed. One thing that cannot be ignored is that my narrative/analysis is a representation of fluidities that are, almost wholly, experienced outside of representation. However, there is no way this conundrum can be easily circumnavigated