Towards Elsewhere: Black Queer Literature and the Politics of Movement

In “Towards Elsewhere: Black Queer Literature and the Politics of Movement,” I argue that Black queer folks throughout the twentieth century employ geographical movement as a means of sexual exploration and discovery that allows them to defy subjection, dissent and silence. Repurposing a term to describe the experience of traveling to another space in order to gain autonomy and self-understanding as a queer person — which I call elsewhere — my dissertation expands on the work of Black queer theorists and feminist scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott, Jennifer C. Nash and Nadia Ellis. Each chapter focuses on understudied texts and materials by well-known Black queer authors. In chapter one, I examine the letters and autobiographical texts of Langston Hughes, discussing the absence of any mention of his own sexuality in an epistemological reading of Hughes’s closet, where he seeks sexual discovery in a reticent manner. Moving from the early to mid-twentieth century, chapter two focuses on James Baldwin, integrating archival material obtained from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture about his travels in Paris and Istanbul alongside a reading of his final novel, Just Above My Head. Both the archival material and the novel support a narrative that Baldwin sought exploration and discovery as a means to an end through exile, disentangling his sexuality from Black internationalist relations at a cost to his sense of self. Finally, chapter three attends to well-known Black, lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, analyzing Zami alongside her later work, The Cancer Journals and Burst of Light to meditate on travel as a way to empower Lorde’s self-exploration while placing limitations on her health, as I use her work to think through fame as a lasting effect on one’s own subjection. Comparing the connections across these Black queer authors expands our understanding of intimacy; “Towards Elsewhere” reveals how the transgressive wandering of travel can counterintuitively ground queer subjectivity and deepen intimacy.