Visualizing Erotic Freedom in Black Feminist Fiction and TV, 1973-2020

“Visualizing Erotic Freedom” shows how contemporary Black comedic TV draws on the aesthetic legacy of the Black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s to re-envision Black sexualities on their own terms. This project unfolds in two parts. Part 1 shows that texts from the Black women’s literary renaissance offer nonrealist visual vocabularies as innovative strategies for cultivating intimacy in the face of structural anti-Blackness and misogyny. Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) provides a revised theory of the gaze, establishing looking together as a technique of relational plenitude that is erotic in Audre Lorde’s sense of a shared sensuous or spiritual energy. In for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1976), Ntozake Shange enacts erotic fullness by employing choreopoetic apposition: nonrealist strategies of critical distance per Bertolt Brecht that range from syntactic objectification (poetic disruptions to syntax that denaturalize subject and object) to vignette structure (loosely related monologues arranged side by side). Part 2 argues that contemporary Black TV creators redeploy these aesthetic principles to build Black erotic worlds independent of entrenched sexual discourses. Robin Thede’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019-) uses puppets – and a puppet version of Shange’s for colored girls – to destabilize the stuff of the self, spoofing realist interpretive assumptions that condition the reception of Black women’s art in the post-Civil Rights era. Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (2018-) provides its own historiographical critique in vignette form, arguing that the critical gendering of abstraction since the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s has resulted in a failure to read Afrosurrealism and Black feminism together. Issa Rae’s insecure (2016) similarly puts critical distance to generative effect, using the nonrealist excesses of the ratchet to refuse easy incorporation into linear narratives of empowerment. Gazing askew at political realities during two periods of amplified conservatism and social services defunding (the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and the 2017-2021 presidential administration of Donald J. Trump), my texts of focus display a Black feminist commitment to denaturalizing historically contingent expressions of anti-Blackness and misogyny while enacting alternative worlds of erotic freedom through popular art.2024-08-0