Keguro Macharia - Frottage : frictions of intimacy across the black diaspora

Sexual Cultures

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

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

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Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

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Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

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The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

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The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

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Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

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

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

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

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God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

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

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

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

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Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

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A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

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The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

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Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

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Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Robb Hernndez

Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora

Keguro Macharia

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

Keguro Macharia

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Macharia, Keguro, author.

Title: Frottage : frictions of intimacy across the black diaspora / Keguro Macharia.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007704 | ISBN 9781479881147 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479865017 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: African diaspora. | BlacksSocial conditions. | Sex. | Queer theory.

Classification: LCC DT16.5 .M26 2019 | DDC 306.7089/96dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007704

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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to all my anonymous tricks

I first read Alex Haleys Roots (1976) in the late 1980s, in my parents Nairobi home. It left me with a haunting image of slavery that has guided me to this book. Following his capture, Kunta Kinte is locked in a slave hold, chained together with other men: he very slowly and carefully explored his shackled right wrist and ankle with his left hand.... He pulled lightly on the chain; it seemed to be connected to the left ankle and wrist of the man he had fought with. On Kuntas left, chained to him by the ankles, lay some other man, someone who kept up a steady moaning, and they were all so close that their shoulders, arms, and legs touched if any of them moved even a little.

The image gains in intensity as the narrative continues. During a brutal storm, bodies rub against each other and against the ship: each movement up and down, or from side to side, sent the chained mens naked shoulders, elbows, and buttocksalready festered and bleedinggrinding down even harder against the rough boards beneath them, grating away still more of the soft infected skin until the muscles underneath began rubbing against the boards. affiliations, geohistorical origins, or philosophical orientations. In fact, several kinds of rubbing are taking place: bodies against each other; bodies against the ship; writing implements against ledgers; and the rubbing in the slave holds against the writing in the ledgers. I use the term