![]() ![]() These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. ![]() Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. Henry names “Black queer flesh”-a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. ![]() Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. ![]()
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