A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities.

The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.

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 DustTowards an Epistemology of Identity /And Beyond (Addendum)The Death of the Same Others& The Discipline ofJouissance /Chapter 2:The Making of a ManA Modernist Etiology of American Masculinities:Trauma, Testimony, Resistance /Chapter 3:Dying Metaphors and Deadly FantasiesFreud, Baldwin, and the Meta-psychoanalysis of Race /Chapter 4:Desire as E mag e nationSouth African Black Consciousness and Post-Identity in Rozena Maarts No Rosa, No District Six /Chapter 5:The Substance of Things Hoped ForMelvin DixonsVanishingRooms;or Racism Intimately /Chapter 6:Writing as I Lay DyingAIDS Literature and the H(a)unting of Blackness /Chapter 7:The Words ImageSelf-Portrait as a Conscious Lie Followed by:Motion, Perception and (Self-)TransformationA Postdated Note /Selective Bibliography /Index