Robert F. Reid-Pharr - Archives of flesh: African America, Spain, and post-humanist critique

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

Judith Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2016 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ISBN : 978-1-4798-8573-2 (hardback)

ISBN : 978-1-4798-4362-6 (paperback)

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For

Joanna Reid Bacote and Robert Lyons Pharr

As ever, I have relied fully on the kindness of friends and strangers. The first faltering words of Archives of Flesh were delivered at Oxford University while I was in residence in the winter of 2010 as the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of American Literature. I thank Ron Bush for hosting me during my stay in Oxford. I later arrived at the American University of Beirut as the Edward Said Visiting Professor of American Studies and the College of William and Mary as the Sara and Jess Cloud Visiting Professor of English. In both instances I was privileged to encounter remarkably gifted students and breathtakingly generous colleagues. Among the folks at AUB whom I owe, and owe big, are Adam Waterman, David Wrisley, Robert Myers, and Patrick McGreevy. Adam, David, Robert, and Patrick are leaders among a group of intellectuals in Beirut who not only shepherded me through the complexities of Lebanese and American bureaucracy, but also entertained me, fed me, and put up with my bumbling attempts to bring this project to life. I would also like to thank Marj Henningsen, who adopted me when I arrived on campus, then sent me back to New York a better person than the one she first met. At the College of William and Mary I encountered even more brilliant students and generous colleagues, all of whom made me remember daily why I chose this profession. Great thanks are in order to Hermine Pinson and Susan Donaldson, who as chair of the English Department was unremittingly kind and efficient. My time at William and Mary also gave me the opportunity to reconnect with my college friends Scott Nelson and Cindy Hahamovitch. Scott and Cindy greatly inspired me when I was an undergraduate at Chapel Hill and they continue to inspire me today.

In 2010 I presented work from Archives of Flesh at Duke University in a wonderful seminar organized by the even more wonderful Karla Holloway. Robyn Wiegman offered a captivating response to my paper that still operates for me as a model of collegiality and intellectual rigor. I was thrilled to have my friends Maurice Wallace, Wahneema Lubiano, Fred Moten, and Miles Grier in attendance at that session. Giovanna Covi approached me with an invitation to be one of the plenary speakers at the 2011 conference of the Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord Americani in Trento, Italy. I gladly acknowledge Giovannas generosity. My dear friend Derek Brueckner organized a cold February 2012 visit for me at the University of Manitoba. I thank both Derek and his partner in crime, David Churchill, for their ongoing support. In 2013 I was honored to deliver the Sidney Kaplan lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thanks to TreaAndrea Russworm for the invitation. That same year, Michael Bronski organized a talk for me at Harvard University under the auspices of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. I thank both Michael and the generous audience I encountered at Harvard. I gratefully acknowledge Paula Moyas gracious 2014 invitation to present work at Stanford University under the auspices of the Program in Modern Language and Thought. I also want to acknowledge Cam Awkward-Rich for his insightful response to my presentation. I am equally grateful for the invitation from Ezra Tawil to deliver a talk at the University of Rochester during the same year. At the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa I presented a section of this book as the 2014 Robert Milton Young Memorial Lecture. I would like to acknowledge Yolanda M. Manora for organizing this event, one made more precious still by the presence of my mentor, Trudier Harris. Charles Rowell of the journal